Graph of the English Language
Dictionaries are really great tools, but they can only go so far. The really good ones (The OED) will give the user a really good ‘feel’ for the word, a sense of the connotations that go beyond the straightforward definition….
Weekly Summary of Noospheric Echolocutions
This past week I finished my reading of Mandelbrot’s most recent book The (Mis)Behavior of Markets. I actually didn’t like it that much. I found the book to be especially light on details; for a mathematical empiricist Mandelbrot didn’t actually…
Scope Resolution
I purchased myself a really nice Christmas present: Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming. So far it has been a really nice read. Though I’m not familiar with the Mozart/Oz system that’s used (and conceptually developed) throughout the book,…
Composition vs. Inheritance
Ok, so we’ve seen that concurrency and inheritance don’t really mix that well. In fact, they don’t really mix at all. GoF say that we should prefer composition to inheritance. But I’ll be taking the extreme approach and asking “Can…
Module-Oriented Programming
I’ve been ruminating over the different ways in which we have structured our computer programs over the years. Most of the world has focused on C, and it seems to organize programs into data structures and functions that operate on…
OOCP
Today I read Analysis of Inheritance Anomaly in Object-Oriented Concurrent Programming Languages, and it seems that the idea that I had last week about implementing every object instance as it’s own process has already been considered. As I expected, this…
Call-Trace capability in IDEs
I was thinking about the features that I’d want in a perfect language, and recalled something I was reading about compiler type-checking. I believe that the common type-checking algorithm can be adapted to do checking of interfaces. An IDE should…
Unreliable Intuitions
Qt is a really wonderful and nice toolbox, and I thoroughly enjoy working with it, so it’s unfortunate that I’m using it for my example of one of the many things wrong with C++. In my opinion C++ is a…
Functional Programming with Erlang
Last week I was reading Joe’s new book Programming Erlang and just couldn’t seem to get my mind around Functional Programming. You see when Joe says Concurrency is easy. We don’t have shared memory. I have my memory, you have…
Linguistic Comparisons
Much of what is done is the way of linguistic comparison seems to be a bit subjective. The most favorite is to gather a bunch of idioms and then set them against each other drawing obvious conclusions, like language X…