russell

190 ms·

781.
by russell 17y ago
Bruce Eclkel's pretty much state the anti-checked-exception camp: http://www.mindview.net/Etc/Discussions/CheckedExceptions There are very good comments from both points of view. The blog was written several years ago, so his solution is
782.
by russell 17y ago
It's not a rehash. Dare uses "Worse is better" as a jumping off point to examine why Ted Nelson's Xanadu failed while the much less capable WWW succeeded. He says Xanadu was much too complex to even get out the door. I remember visiting t
783.
by russell 17y ago
I usually give a different email address to each service that I sign up to, so I can tell if they are selling my address, but I never thought of giving a different mother's maiden name so I can detect phishing. It's a reasonable strategy,
784.
by russell 17y ago
Wonderful, wonderful. Way beyond your typical anti-IP rant.
785.
by russell 17y ago
Perhaps a simpler (less than 49 pages) explanation is that our ability to make nuanced decisions is clouded by our survival instinct to make quick decisions in the face of danger, hunting, or competition.
786.
by russell 17y ago
What is the point of a design competition where the winners are for things that cannot be produced even in the laboratory or defy the laws of physics? The winner is just a stylish steamer that copied a staple of Star Trek. A cup of Earl G
787.
by russell 17y ago
I call crap on this. He wants more work in journals so academics can sort out their pecking order. The rest of us dont want an emphasis on traditional journals because they are an expensive and time consuming gateway to the dissemination
788.
by russell 17y ago
There are no particular ethical or legal issues involved in turning down an offer after accepting it, although you have burned your bridges with that company. (IANAL) It goes both ways. Companies occasionally rescind offers and usually th
789.
by russell 17y ago
I like the dichotomy between High Fidelity and Convenience. Harvard is a Hi-Fi immersive experience, but it costs a lot of money and you have to move to Cambridge MA for four years. Online courses lack fidelity but are high at the conveni
790.
by russell 17y ago
Wash your hands after every contact. Vitamin C and Zinc, If you have young children, you are just out of luck.
791.
by russell 17y ago
Me too. On an IBM 7094. And I thought you were just a kid.
792.
by russell 17y ago
Actually, I dont think real AI will be modeled on the brain, but I do think understanding the brain will be key. There are 100 billion parallel processing components with some significant fraction of a quadrillion interconnections. I thin
793.
by russell 17y ago
No. Real AI is like fusion power. It will arrive in 40 years, for any definition of now. We are barely scratching the surface of our knowledge of the brain. We are orders of magnitude away from its processing power. We dont even have a
794.
by russell 17y ago
Sure. Pick some stasis period before modern capitalism. No central heating. Periodic starvation. No health care. Very low literacy. No universal education. Forty percent murder rate for males. Slavery. No Internet!! I sure want to b
795.
by russell 17y ago
The article shows how to figure out where you are failing in a large government project. You would think that someone somewhere would learn that large monolithic-fix-all-our-problems-and-replace-all-our-antiquated-systems-at-once projects
796.
by russell 17y ago
>> ... making everything easy to change makes the entire system very complex ... I have to agree with that, but then no architectural insight means having to reimplement at the most inconvenient time. I think making everything over
797.
by russell 17y ago
It may be better, but it sure is taking forever. The original bay bridge took 3 years to build, but the new one is taking 24 years from the time of the Loma Prieta Earthquake which caused a portion of the original bridge to collapse. Thin
798.
by russell 17y ago
I take his essay to mean that, if you want results, measure results and hold them to it. Chess experts are experts because they are measured by their results. Political pundits are hit hit or miss because they are not held accountable for
799.
by russell 17y ago
"Quantitative metrics typically fail." Tattoo this on your forehead so that you se it every morning. If you punish bugs, people are going to stop reporting them against themselves or their teammates. I often report bugs against myself so
800.
by russell 17y ago
My 2 cents from doing language design is that it is hard because it's hard to avoid making stupid mistakes. A successful language is a way bigger beast than you started out with. Perrone's advice about getting feedback is crucial. Point
801.
by russell 17y ago
I make my living in the Java based web world and I would not recommend it because it is not nearly so programmer productive as other frameworks like Django. I would expect the same would also be true of C#. You really want something that
802.
by russell 17y ago
From one point of view it's all binary, but here are the layers of one project that I worked on (and this is the simplified version): Browser > javascript > client library > jQuery > apache > Jboss > Spring > Tom
803.
by russell 17y ago
There are lots of good articles out there on font choices for the web and this seems to be a reasonable, if cursory, introduction. I personally dont care for either Times and prefer Georgia for a serif typeface that works for both monitor
804.
by russell 17y ago
EDIT: so now I've actually read the article. The point about legal vetting is valid. Rather than having each piece of code approved, there should be a policy some thing like, improvements to existing open source are OK, general interest u
805.
by russell 17y ago
"You might have to cleanup your code," sounds like sufficient reason to release to open source. Your company will benefit even if no one else picks it up.
806.
by russell 17y ago
Sometimes You Do Need It vs. You Ain't Gonna Need It. I suppose he is arguing Einstein's make it as simple as possible but no simpler. I look at YAGNI as a filter not a hard and fast design principle. When starting a non trivial project,
807.
by russell 17y ago
Thus bookmarked. Reminds me of the day that I discovered a reference that allowed me to parse a hairy C declaration into English and to compose my intention into a hairy declaration. I carried the book around for years.
808.
by russell 17y ago
Assembly language yes, machine coding as in flipping switches on the front panel is probably going too far. I suppose you dont really need to know how a cpu works to be a journeyman programmer, but I think to be truly innovative you need t
809.
by russell 17y ago
They have been used to a limited extent at least as far back as the apple Newton. In a sense drag and drop is gesture based. Sign language is gesture based. I dont think gestures will find much use in programming because of the lack of pr
810.
by russell 17y ago
From the masthead, "never before have I with so little to say said so much to so few" Could be the motto of the Internet. The stiff fingers are only a problem with Java. With Python you can keep up with only a line a day. With APL a singl

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