The Progress Phallus

My friend Ray runs numerical simulations and wanted to have a decent progress bar for his code. A bit of web searching revealed some code, that takes care of this automatically. However, we thought that an ordinary progress bar is…

Higher-Order Functions in Java

This Summer I’ve been teaching Intro to Computer Languages. It’s a really awesome class, with alot of good material in it. Last week, my students got back the results of their midterms, and were disappointed in their scores. Immediately, I…

A language should be focused on writing Internal DSLs

I’ve been reading Martin Fowler’s book, Domain-Specific Languages, this weekend. He covered a number of ways in which you can structure your code to achieve what he terms an Internal DSL. Quite a bit is focused on the discussion of…

Const-correctness

One of my fellow lab-mates has already posted about const-correctness, because of some similar issues. My work today, takes it a tiny bit further into sheer insanity. If you don’t start your program off using a const-correctness discipline, it’s very…