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 …
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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):
- Michael Eakin
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 …
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Posted Mon 07 November 2011
by mcherm
in Politics
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 …
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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 …
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Posted Mon 26 September 2011
by mcherm
in Science
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 …
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Posted Tue 23 August 2011
by mcherm
in Programming