Friday, February 8, 2002

"We are all members of the Church of Murphy, whether we use static or dynamic environments.  " [Scripting News] But the two incarnations of Murphy differ. Statically-typed environments are harder to learn at first, because a short algorithm is surrounded by tons of declaration boilerplate (Java is a notorious offender here), or relies on a subtle type inference procedure (as in ML or Haskell). Dynamically-typed environments give you more rope, to good and bad results, but make small programs easier to write. Question: what would you choose for an intro to programming class? Programmers need to learn ways of controlling Murphy. Which come first, data invariants (helped by static typing), or control invariants (easier to explain in brief programs not surrounded by declaration boilerplate)? 11:03:55 PM

The 2001 Turing Award went to Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard of Norway.  [Scripting News] I first learned OOP from their writings and programming in Simula-67, which like its uncle Algol-60 was a great improvement on most of its successors. 10:52:13 PM

Dave wants to go skiing in Vail. He also wants a T1 there. This unappointed ski consultant says: Vail is boring and expensive. The Colorado Rockies are having a mediocre snow year. Utah is doing much better, just wait until after the Olympics and take advantage of all the rock-bottom deals from overbuilt lodging. Or just drive a few hours to your beautiful backyard. Below average snowpack, but still very good. No T1s in the Tahoe backcountry. Which is good. Dave responds that he likes boring. His software and writing are anything but, why should his skiing be? 8:43:13 PM