Computer Language Comparison

Guillaume Marceau has used data from the Computer Language Benchmark Game to provide a graphical comparison of many different languages. If you drew the benchmark results on an XY chart you could name the four corners. The fast but verbose…

Decentralized Garbage Collection

When I visited Washington D.C. for ASPLOS/VEE, I was working on my paper about cascade failure, and had distributed systems on my mind. Some of the papers at the joint conference were about garbage collection. One of the more interestring…

An Atheist Goes to Church

I, together with a group from AAR, went to Voyager’s Church today. I was reminded, in many ways, of why I don’t like Church. The service opened with a song, All Because of Jesus by Casting Crowns (lyrics) I was…

Automatic Thesaurus

Last week, I landed on another PhD worthy research project. Given a very large corpus of sentences, such as a digitized version of the Library of Congress, or a less noisy version of the Internet, how can you automatically generate…

Philosophy of Computer Science: Naming

For a very long time, western culture has had a strong undercurrent about naming. Conceptually, it starts with the recognition that the ability to name a thing gives you power over it. This is reflected in many deep and ancient…