I saw this interesting article about a weakness in the Scala language. The weakness applies not just to Scala, but to pretty much any language: the community using the language cannot grow past a certain point until it somehow solves the problem of libraries depending on other libraries in a …
Posted Wed 07 December 2011 by mcherm in Programming
My election guide for November 8, 2011.
My endorsements in Bold.
Retention of Judge, Pennsylvania Supreme Court (retain or not):
NO, do not retain! -- In 2006, The PA State Legislature voted itself a pay raise in direct violation of the plain wording of the state constitution which states …
If you have complete and accurate requirements for your project which won't change, and your development team is spot-on in estimating and highly consistent in their development pace. and there are no surprises, then you can produce highly accurate project timeline estimates up front. Such accurate estimates are (or, more …
Posted Wed 28 September 2011 by mcherm in Programming
Lots of science writers are getting very excited about the news that an experiment measured neutrinos going faster than light. But as we all know, they are overreacting.
Look, this really shouldn't
surprise anyone who has ever done any actual science. Karl
Popper had a really simple
and idealistic concept …
Armen Rigo has a blog posting (worthy of an article of its own) proposing using STM (Software Transactional Memory) in PyPy. In a discussion on reddit someone suggested that you could have weaker threading guarantees and just use locks manually. It wouldn't be so hard, they explained, because:
You really …
Posted Tue 23 August 2011 by mcherm in Programming