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…
The Jet-powered Car
I had a really long discussion about car engines with my co-worker today. He has tons of information locked in his head about internal combustion design. We touched on valve and cylinder design, compression ratios, cam design. Discussed all the…
Relational Programming
Back in the dark-ages of computing we all had a hierarchical database with which to store our precious information. It was known as the file system. Then efficiency became vogue and organizational demands moved everyone to explicit database applications (client-server…
The Language of the Future
Most of the popular languages today (Perl/Python/Php/Ruby, C++, Java) are all locked into the serial, von-Neumann model of computation. Concurrency is expressed as Threads and Processes, which rely on the underlying OS’s handling of memory and other resources. Joe Armstrong…
Multi-Core Multi-Language Machines
I was doing my traditional web searching about languages, this time beginning with parallel lisp. I was wondering, if LISP, being one of the oldest and original languages, had explored the concurrency model, and what concepts it had to offer….
The Cloud
I was reading Marc Andreessen’s blog entry about The three kinds of platforms you meet on the Internet. and all his talk about sharing code and running that code on other systems and community and all that really got me…
End of the Keyboard
Lets review a few really awesome experiments with user-interfaces, and then I’ll introduce my own. First, we have the Optimus Keyboard. Each key on this board has it’s own display. That means you can use the board for all sorts…
Tuition-Free Education
From, My Biased Coin we have an argument for a Tuition Free Harvard. While, this is a really great idea, I don’t think it goes far enough. I actually think that the goal of providing a reputable education at zero…
Linguistics and SciFi
Ok, It’s been more than a week since I last wrote down any of my thoughts. I recently went on travel for work, and gave a presentation of the software that I’ve been working on. I was received well, and…