Who Did You Save Today?
Thursday, April 13th, 2006No explanation needed.
Archive for April, 2006
Great Programmers?
Thursday, April 13th, 2006Who do you think of when someone says, "great programmers"? Guy Steele, Brian Kernighan, Erich Gamma, and Anders Hejlsberg come to mind, but who else? Whose code do you think is particularly worth emulating? (Yes, I have an ulterior motive for asking... stay tuned... ;-)
Online Marking Grant
Thursday, April 13th, 2006Jennifer Campbell and I just heard that we've been awarded an ITCDF grant by the University of Toronto, which will let us hire a couple of student programmers over the summer to complete an online system for reviewing and grading. Very excited---it'll be a chance to do some raaaather ...
Strong Typing, Unit Testing, and Science
Thursday, April 13th, 2006I've doing a technical review of a new book on object-oriented analysis & design that spends several pages discussing strongly-typed vs. freely-typed languages (using Java and Ruby as examples). The author asserts that unit testing does for FTLs what static type-checking does for STLs. I've heard this claim before---in fact, I may even ...
BIND Patents
Wednesday, April 12th, 2006Unleashed Informatics, the spin-off successor to Blueprint, has announced that it is going to enforce its patent on a "system for electronically managing, finding, and/or displaying biomolecular interactions." Three of my 49X projects were with Blueprint---we built testing infrastructure, a SOAP interface, and a graph search engine for their ...
The Ruby Is Always Greener…
Tuesday, April 11th, 2006This post, titled "Why Ruby On Rails Won't Become Mainstream", has kicked off a lot of discussion (see, for example, Ted Leung's response). The whole conversation is both entertaining and thought-provoking, but I was amused by point #5: "Ruby on Rails has pretty much nuked the field ...
A Sign of a Good Book
Monday, April 10th, 2006One sign of a good book is that you keep finding new things in it. A while back, I asked for help in pulling content out of mailboxes with Python. I should have checked my shelves before I posted: John Goerzen's Foundations of PYthon Network Programming, which I ...
A Language for Games
Monday, April 10th, 2006Danc has a post this morning about GameInnovation.org, a Carnegie-Mellon project to document innovations in the gaming industry. As the meta-post points out, lack of a shared language is an obstacle to high-level discussion about game design, even among experienced designers. Cataloguing what's been done already is therefore ...
341 Words
Sunday, April 9th, 2006The glossary for the Software Carpentry course now defines 341 terms. What may be more interesting (for those of you who have been following the course's development) is what I've taken out: Code coverage and execution profiling: they really should be in the course, but don't fit into any of ...
Mesh: Good News and Bad
Sunday, April 9th, 2006The good news is the speaker lineup at the upcoming Mesh conference in Toronto. The bad news? Only 6 out of 50 are women. As Michelle Levesque and I observed two years ago, despite the frequency with which our community talks about "rights", we have a lousy ...