Embedded Languages
I don’t like them. I’ve ranted before about how the Web is a festering polyglot made horrific by Postel’s Law. Many, including Tim Bray, advocate more knowledge at the client end, when an error occurs in parsing the steaming pile…
Scaling Automated CS Education
The success of Salman Kahn’s Academy and other instances of disruptive education, have started me thinking about how computer science education might scale. Let’s first analyze how Kahn is organizing the learning experience. First: Have a huge collection of videos….
Keyboard Kraziness
Again, I spent far too much time looking at different keyboards. This time around, however, I can see that some people are progressing toward my latest ideal: The multi-touch surface with re-configurable keys. Mostly, I want to record all the…
Measuring Effectiveness of a Domain Specific Language
Also, at CGO I met Hassan Chafi, who is working on a graph-based Domain Specific Language. Even though I never seem to find time that I can explicitly devote to studying them, DSL’s are, to me, an compulsively fascinating topic….
Express yourself: to the compiler and to your fellow developer.
The keynote speaker at CGO 2012 (Chris Lattner, LLVM) put some crazy thoughts into my head. Want compiler to know about: memory disjointness aliasing Usage of data structures (array of struct vs struct of arrays) whether arithmetic is done on…
Thoughts on Hugo’s Thought Experiment
Dear Hugo Salinas Price, In your article, Second Thoughts on the ‘Thought Experiment, you raised a sequence of 5 items which together form an objection which led you to believe that the Thought Experiment had to “go back to the…