Edsger W. Dijkstra possessed an extraordinary ability to communicate elegantly and precisely. I admire, but could never emulate his ability to put an entire essay into a single statement. Yesterday I came across the following gem:
The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the …
Posted Sun 09 December 2007 by mcherm in Programming
About four weeks ago, the project that I was working on was abruptly canceled. It wasn't that there was anything wrong with the way the project was going -- there were lots of things wrong with the way the project was going, but the cancellation was due to a change in …
Posted Mon 03 December 2007 by mcherm in Programming
Suppose that you have a collection of numbers or perhaps of WidgetManagerHandles -- could be most anything that can be sorted. We'll suppose that these are stored in an array and that you can take as much time as you need beforehand to organize the array, after which we will try …
Posted Thu 22 November 2007 by mcherm in Programming
You've certainly heard of Dijkstra's famous article: "GOTO Considered Harmful". You may well even have heard about how it was actually Niklaus Wirth who gave it that title. These are interesting bits of history, but they've been covered by better bloggers than myself; my topic takes me a little beyond …
Posted Thu 15 November 2007 by mcherm in Programming