Feb 14
Paul Krill asked Bill Gates about declarative languages and how they are the future (and ironically the past!). Bill talked about some of the work happening at Microsoft:
“Most code that’s written today is procedural code. And there’s been this holy grail of development forever, which is that you shouldn’t have to write so much [procedural] code,” Gates said. “We’re investing very heavily to say that customization of applications, the dream, the quest, we call it, should take a tenth as much code as it takes today.”
“You should be able to do things on a declarative basis,” Gates continued. But this has not caught on partially because of weak data models — first Codasyl and then relational. Stronger data models since have emerged, such as rich schemas around XML as well as modeling work being done by Microsoft and others, Gates said. “We’re bringing the data models up to be much, much richer, and we think in that environment, a lot of business logic can be done in a declarative form. Now, we haven’t totally proven this yet. We’re doing a lot of internal developments ourselves that way,” including some Microsoft business applications, he said.
“We’re not here yet saying that [a declarative language has] happened and you should write a ton less procedural code, but that’s the direction the industry is going,” Gates said. “And, despite the fact that it’s taken longer than people expected, we really believe in it. It’s something that will change software development but more like in a five- to eight-year timeframe than overnight,” he said.
I am guessing that the work of Doug Purdy, ChrisAn, and Don Box is fitting into this world, as well the mentioned work of Brad Lovering.
But…. maybe the future is a port of Jelly ;)
Feb 14
Build a Continuation DSL … without using class_eval
What about the other languages?
Got some good ones for other languages like Fortran, BASIC or assembly?
Feb 13
How would you write this regex… using less than 12 characters
What about the other languages?
Got some good ones for other languages like Fortran, BASIC or assembly?
Feb 13
I had an enjoyable first trip to Disneyland. It isn’t the typical trip that I would take in the past and I never did this kind of thing as a kid. Sam had a fantastic time, which is all I really wanted.
I did have to fight back the cynic in me though, and I let it out in the comic above. That doesn’t even mention the part of the parade that talks about how Disneyland inspires the world, or how it is the most beautiful and PEACEFUL place on Earth ;)
I did have some fun though:
Feb 12
Write a Stack class… and a full suite of tests without IoC
What about the other languages?
Got some good ones for other languages like Fortran, BASIC or assembly?
Feb 11
Write a better malloc routine… using the STL
What about the other languages?
Got some good ones for other languages like Fortran, BASIC or assembly?
Feb 10
Prove you can write an OO program in C… without dispatch vtables
What about the other languages?
Got some good ones for other languages like Fortran, BASIC or assembly?
Feb 09
Us techies love to talk about OpenID and the like. We complain about the idea of signing for one more bloody service.
However, OpenID has a few usability issues for non-technical folk. I can’t imagine explaining to my mum that she has to login using a domain URL. “You want me to type http://myopenidserver.com/seeg in the browser?” “No! that is your username!”.
Well, these days could be numbered. I heard that there was a lot of chatter on this topic at Social Foo, and Brad has one solution using < a href="http://yadis.org/wiki/Main_Page">Yadis as opposed to the more pure DNS, or hacky ~username solutions.
Getting my mum to use her email as a username won’t be an issue. Hopefully she won’t fall for any OpenID phishing attacks though if it becomes popular.
Feb 08
One of the interesting differences between a liberal opensource project, and a commercial endeavor is that you don’t know who is using your stuff.
If someone wants to extend or integrate beyond your work, they don’t need to deal with you to make it happen.
The fun side-effect is when you get the code drop. Out of the blue, someone sends you a message and says “oh, by the way, I just ported X to work with Y”.
This really keeps you on your toes, and it gives you a gift. The “oh man, that is so amazing that they did that work, now I don’t need too!” gift.
Feb 07
Do you ever feel like you get bounced around as everyone aggregates each others info in a loop?
