It is likely that few features cause as much problems as pointers and references in statement-oriented languages, such as C, C++ and Java. They are powerful, yes, and they allow us to control quite precisely how a program is to represent something. We can use them to conveniently compose objects and data without the redundancy [...]
I thought I’d write a more personal note for a change. It’s been just over a year since I started studying for my Ph.D. — formally, I entered the program in April 2009. With at least two years to go, how do things look with some hindsight? What do I think it means to obtain [...]
The project I’ve been working on for some time (the last year or so) is starting to acquire a more definite form, and hopefully more information about it will be released in the coming months. Its official name is now Poplar, and the current official overview is available here. Basically it revolves around protocol based [...]
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 [...]
Following a comment on my previous foray into bibliography management systems, I had a look at the product known as Mendeley. In order to evaluate Mendeley, let’s ask ourselves what we want from a bibliography management system in the modern research environment. At a bare minimum, we want an easy way to catalogue and search [...]
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