Many software developers, while making a tool to solve a specific problem, heed the siren call of generality. By making a few specific changes, they can turn the tool into a general framework for solving a larger class of problems. And then, with a few more changes, an even larger class of problems, and so [...]
Monomorphic
Conceptual meandering
programming languages
Overloading words in research and programming
In research and academia, one of the fundamental activities is the invention and subsequent examination of new concepts. For concepts, we need names. One way of making a name is stringing words together until the meaning is sufficiently specific. E.g. “morphism averse co-dependent functor substitutions in virtual machine transmigration systems”. Thus the abstruse academic research [...]
A wikipedia of algorithms
Here’s something I’ve wanted to see for some time, but probably don’t have time to work on myself. It would be nice if there was a wikipedia-like web site for code and algorithms. Just the common ones to start with, but perhaps more specialised ones over time. Of course the algorithms should be available in [...]
Where is Java going?
Today, Java is one of the most popular programming languages. Introduced in 1995, it rests on a tripod of the language itself, its libraries, and the JVM. In the TIOBE programming language league charts, it has been at the top for as long as the measurements have been made (since 2002), overtaken by C only [...]
Programming languages are about people
Programming languages are more about people and less about machines. Programming languages are about staying inside the limitations of people’s minds and their ability to keep track of and work with abstractions. If people had no such limitations, they could code in assembly language all the time. Programming languages and supporting tools and environments are [...]
