Keith Devens .com

Tuesday, September 13, 2005

Program-Transformation.Org. Looks like an interesting site.

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Why do so many of the sites in my blogroll say they've been updated when they haven't? Some clearly ping every time they get a new comment, which is bad, but for others I can't discern a reason why they're shown as having been updated.

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1337, via Steve. Hahahaha.

¶ (0) Tags: [Random]

Visitor pattern considered useless:

The Visitor pattern is a trick to introduce multiple dispatch in a language that lacks it.

Hmm... Via Slava, who says the same thing regarding the Slate programming language.

¶ (0) Tags: [Programming]

lgf: Steyn: Flight 93, Re-Hijacked. To read.

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ongoing · Radical New Language Idea. Heh.

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Three-Letter Word List. To mine for fun temp/illustrative variable names (I often use foo bar baz boo goo zoo woo loo coo roo moo, and temp, blah, and roar for four letter temps).

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Agile Testing: Running a Python script as a Windows service. Cool. Via Luc.

¶ (0) Tags: [Programming]

Lies in code:

Thread.sleep(500); // Sleep 10 milliseconds

Update: And a little later, in part of a large block of code that was obviously cut and pasted:

Thread.sleep(threadSleep); // Sleep 10 milliseconds

¶ (2) Tags: [Programming]

Internet Alchemy: Crisis [in the RDF camp]: "If professional cataloguers are having these kinds of problems with RDF then we are fucked."

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Some software quotes

While searching my blog for an old link I came across one of my favorite quotes about abstraction, from Joel Spolsky:

And if you go too far up, abstraction-wise, you run out of oxygen. Sometimes smart thinkers just don't know when to stop, and they create these absurd, all-encompassing, high-level pictures of the universe that are all good and fine, but don't actually mean anything at all.

Also, this one from Knuth is new to me (via):

The designer of a new kind of system must participate fully in the implementation.

This one from Hoare is a classic:

There are two ways of constructing a software design; one way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult.

Full version I hadn't seen elsewhere from here. I liked this as well:

Newton was a genius, but not because of the superior computational power of his brain. Newton's genius was, on the contrary, his ability to simplify, idealize, and streamline the world so that it became, in some measure, tractable to the brains of perfectly ordinary men. —Gerald M. Weinberg

I thought this quote applies, among other things, to the subject of Joel's article: