Science creates Gods
I’ve been watching the Beyond Belief 2006 conference on the relationship between Science and religion. While I didn’t agree with all of the views expressed I did learn many things. That when you ask someone to give up their religion,…
Class Inheritance as a cyclic graph
This is a highly speculative idea. Lately, I’ve been dreaming of a system where inheritance would be extremely general. None of this hierarchical nonsense. I’m looking for something with more flexibility. I’m looking for dynamic binding, done as late as…
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…
The Three types of Existence
I know that I promised a post about process composition and software architecture, but this just can’t wait. Last night I had a really nice conversation with one of my high school friends about the nature of existence. It all…
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…
The Assembly Programmer From Hell
Today I was reading chapter 3 (Revenge of the Nerds) in Steven Pinker’s book How the Mind Works. It talks about evolution and Darwin and Dawkins, and got me thinking about how replicators are all coded with DNA, and how…
Random Ruminations
My thoughts are as entropic as the leaves falling off the trees this season (just about as colored too). Graduate School Applications <rant>I really dislike forms; actually I frothingly detest them. I don’t know why, but I have always hated…
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…