Different Bullets; Different Folks
It's a common occurrence in Hacker News and similar sites to complain about the state, usefulness or bugginess of different technologies (inspired by these posts). While most of these conversations have an important degree of truth despite their sensationalism, there're some baseline concepts that we should all take in consideration when having these discussions.
Good vs Useful
The most important thing people miss out on when talking about the quality of a language/framework/library is that its utility might have very little to do with how well-made the thing in question is.
The classic example here would ...
Blog is BACK
After an endless amount of time, I've finally restored my blogging platform and uploaded some of my old articles again. Old features will be coming back soon!
Programming Languages DO Have Speed
(A reply to this post)
Your favorite language has a lot of differentiating characteristics that separate it from its different alternatives. We might say, naively, that if you consider a language to be just:
- Syntax
- Grammar
- Evaluation rules
- A standard library
you just
might assume speed differences should be small or nil, given pieces of code from two different languages that represent the same operation. Such is not the case. Why?
Syntax and grammar limit or expand your level of abstraction
How does your language copy and array? Does your language say:
- "perform this array copy operation using SSE3 XMM ...
Some Thoughts on Silverlight
Some time I ago I began a project for a customer in an all-Microsoft shop. Given that the project very restrictive time requirements and a RIA design a decision was taken to develop the project with Silverlight
I have have always openly expressed mi preference for Free Software solutions above proprietary ones, and this preference still stands, however throughout this article I'll judge the platform on technical merits alone.
My initial impression came when installing the necessary development environment. Previous to this project I'd worked on several projects using Visual Studio 2008, by all means a very nice ...
12 Reasons to be Learning Graph Theory
Throughout our schooling we always encounter some topics that we feel very strongly about, either because of how fascinating they are or how tediously boring or difficult they may be. Graph Theory is one of those controversial topics CS students will always be opinionated in; you either love it and are fascinated by its utility and applications, or you're appalled by the uselessness of the topic in your career. And let's be honest: when was the last time you actually, honestly had to work with graphs in a serious manner?
Even if you're lucky enough to never ...
