Tuesday  2005-02-01   Development
Disconnected
Just like "dark matter" in the universe, most software professionals are invisible, silent and ancient. Jeff Schneider has been listening to these people: "Jeff, it was only a few years ago that we quit writing programs in Assembler and started writing them in COBOL."
 
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Friday  2004-04-30   Development
Performance anxiety
Worried about performance? What is the fastest way to increment an integer in Java? What is the fastest way to iterate over an array in .Net? Why do we even bother with managed code? [via Patrick Logan]
 
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Wednesday  2004-03-31   Development
Icy MOM
MMORPG or massively multiplayer online role playing games have been a craze over the last several years. Technologically the keyword in MMORPG is 'massive' -- many games support hundreds of thousands or millions of users simultaneously. At the heart of these games is message oriented middleware or MOM. Here are two examples:

• ICE (Internet Communications Engine) from ZeroC
• iPush from Ice Technologies

Tuesday  2004-02-17   Development
Polyglot programming
Interested in multi-language development? Study Poplog, "a free, open source, multi-language software development environment providing incremental compilers for a number of interactive programming languages". Poplog comes with four languages: Common Lisp, ML, Pop-11 and Prolog. These languages can use libraries written in other languages and the users can freely switch between them in the middle of a Poplog interactive session. Even better, users can embed languages! Here is documentation on Prolog and Pop-11; ML and Pop-11; Lisp and Pop-11; Proplog and Lisp.
 
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Sunday  2004-01-04   Development
Programmers' deadly sins
A few of the deadly sins:

• The first deadly sin is to code before you think.
• The third deadly sin is not to write proper documentation.
• The ninth deadly sin is to pretend you are catering for everyone at the same time.

What is the zeroth deadly sin?

Monday  2003-05-26   Development
Trust but verify
Most published papers on software verification deal with software used in research or some narrow vertical industry settings few outsiders have access to. On the contrary L Peter Deutsch's talk "The design, development, and maintenance of Ghostscript: (how) could verification have helped?" covers a widely used piece of software, that has evolved over close to two decades in the public eyes.
More short notes on Deutsch's other contributions like PDP-1 Lisp, Smalltalk and "8 Fallacies of Networking" will come in the future.
 
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Monday  2003-04-07   Development
CSP book is available
Tony Hoare's classic work "Communicating Sequential Processes" is available as PDF.
[From Lambda the Ultimate]
 
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