Just a humorous software bug story, the case of the 500 mile email:
"We're having a problem sending email out of the department." "What's the problem?" I asked. "We can't send mail more than 500 miles," the chairman explained. I choked on my latte. "Come again?"
A must read for CS/IT folks.
It’s bad style, but I must start with an aside: on reddit/scheme, there was a link to a blog series on developing a Scheme interpreter over January 2010. It might not implement any particular Scheme standard or particularly many libraries, but it’s got all the functional elements. Bootstrapping a programming language is fun and easy.
Anyway, he also posted a his personal history of programming language study, and it got me thinking about my own personal programming languages history.
It all started with Logo…
Been busy with my personal version 2, Evelyn or Evie for short, who is now 2 and a half weeks old.
Say hi Evie ^_^
The old-timers might figure out what Brand X really is before the end. For the rest of us, the reveal at the end is just as shocking as the author intended. All and all, it confirms what I suspected: Go nice enough, but it is hardly original. Sure it looks like a great language to write in compared to C, but then again, what doesn’t?
Comparison of Google’s new language “Go” to mysterious “Brand X”, and the shocking reveal of Brand X’s true identity.
As found through http://www.foldl.org/, a digest blog on various programming language topics.
Available for streaming and download, Google Native Client presented at UW’s computer science lecture series. Covers the restrictions on x86 code, new alignment rules, and performance on various benchmarks. 5% overhead, that’s nothing compared to many other sandboxing techniques.
Native client is 50KB download? Wild. It really is just a gatekeeper, runtime library separate.
Of course, I would love to get away from x86. LLVM, or ARM, or even Amd64. x86 makes me a sad panda.