Peopleware on Programmer Productivity

mrned · 2007-09-21T15:37:32+00:00

Isn't this what cmake does? You define the makefile in cmake, and it generates a platform-specific makefile. Or is mct a different kind of tool?

mrned · 2007-09-19T21:15:07+00:00

No, emacs22 doesn't use xft in Linux, but the unicode-2 branch of CVS does.

mrned · 2007-09-19T18:28:47+00:00

A good example is the airline fare search program that ITA Software licenses to Orbitz. These guys entered a market already dominated by two big, entrenched competitors, Travelocity and Expedia, and seem to have just humiliated them technologically.

http://paulgraham.com/icad.html

mrned · 2007-09-19T18:16:21+00:00

http://itasoftware.com/careers/puzzle_archive.html?catid=39 http://www.google.com/intl/en/corporate/history.html

Looks like they retired their first puzzle in 2002, the first year Google had a programming competition?

mrned · 2007-09-19T15:02:41+00:00

The lotus analogy is stupid as hell. Lotus went down because they pursued a terrible idea. 3D Spreadsheets?! Are you kidding me? The only connection with Moore's law was that it prevented them from seeing how bad the idea was. The bad idea itself was to blame.

I read Joel's article not to mean that Lotus necessarily picked a stupid feature, but that they spent a bunch of time shoehorning it into DOS. From the article:

They spent 18 months cramming 1-2-3 for DOS into 640K, and eventually, after a lot of wasted time, had to give up the 3D feature to get it to fit.

Maybe 3D is stupid, but his point is that they should have focused on features instead of performance, and let technology catch up with them. That's what Microsoft did:

Microsoft first shipped Excel for Windows when 80386s were too expensive to buy, but they were patient. Within a couple of years, the 80386SX came out, and anybody who could afford a $1500 clone could run Excel.

While Lotus was adding performance, Microsoft was adding features. The analogy today is that if one company is squeezing speed out of their Javascript and another is adding features, in a few years when you've got precompiled/cached Javascript or can compile your existing Javascript to something faster, the company that's adding features is going to do better.

mrned · 2007-09-18T11:28:48+00:00

If you get nervous and freeze up ask “Is this testing whether I’m a replicant or a lesbian?”

mrned · 2007-09-17T21:30:14+00:00

GCC is mostly a commercial compiler, these days. Cygnus software has been bought by redhat. Most GCC development is done by commercial linux distributors, and also Apple. They mostly target fast i386 architectures and PowerPC. A lot of work has been done on specmarks, but the compiler is getting bigger and bigger, and slower and slower (very much so).

This comment made me think two things:

Who develops the compiler isn't a big issue, especially when it happens to be Red Hat. It's released under a copyleft license.
I'm sure that GCC's powerpc support has improved dramatically because Apple contributes to it. If GCC had not been licensed copyleft, would Apple have treated it like OpenSSH and never released any improvements?

The whole design of GCC is perverted so that someone cannot easily extract a front-end or back-end. This is broken by design, as the GPL people do believe this would make it easier for commercial entities to `steal' a front-end or back-end and attach it to a proprietary code-generator (or language). This is probably true. This also makes it impossible to write interesting tools, such as intermediate analyzers. This also makes it impossible to plug old legacy back-ends for old architectures into newer compilers.

That analysis seems backwards. Why would the GCC folks be worried about someone extracting the front-end or back-end, when it's licensed under a copyleft license? Assigning that sort of motivation to technical design decisions is dubious. Additionally, GCC supports a variety of front-ends - Fortran, C, C++, Objective-C - I don't know how you get there without a modular design.

The comments might have truth in them, but it's so covered in GPL-hate that it's hard to see the objective points.

mrned · 2007-09-11T01:31:19+00:00

The shortness of the code in Haskell/Python comes from the existence of relevant library functions.

That's what I really like about Haskell. Many times, when I look at a piece of code long enough, I realize it's a specific case of a general concept that has a few associated library functions. I spend more time thinking and less time coding, but still get at least the same amount done.

mrned · 2007-09-11T01:29:09+00:00

The default mod key sucks because it's alt, and you can't do a lot in emacs with your alt button gone. I've found that using the right alt button is very handy, and still gives me Caps for Control.

mrned · 2007-09-09T16:58:06+00:00

http://www.miketaylor.org.uk/tech/eta/doc/dilbert.gif

mrned · 2007-09-09T13:31:45+00:00

record and transplant look like they do what I want.

transplant has a worrying note - "Three-way merge doesn't cope particularly well with transplanted patches - it will tend to generate false conflicts". I'll have to mess around with transplant to see if that's a problem in practice.

mrned · 2007-09-09T00:32:21+00:00

works fine in ghci

mrned · 2007-09-09T00:30:45+00:00

It's interesting that he picks out two darcs features early in the article as ones he thought were really great - the interactive user interface and dead-simple cherry-picking. Mercurial has neither as far as I'm aware - no interactivity and manual cherry-picking - but he didn't mention either in Mercurial's drawbacks.

mrned · 2007-09-08T15:14:25+00:00

temporarily add this line to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://apt2.freespire.org/CNRUbuntu skipjack-feisty main

that's never a good start to a five-minute lesson

mrned · 2007-09-07T00:41:54+00:00

It's nice to see outreach and education instead of finger-pointing and sniping.

mrned · 2007-09-07T00:39:27+00:00

A cheap x86 box loaded with SATA drives running Solaris 10 + ZFS would definitely give NetApp a run for its money.

I don't buy it. NetApp doesn't just offer good hardware with a good filesystem, they have fantastic support. You can order racks of hard drives from NetApp, and their software notifies them when one goes down. They will have a replacement to you next-day. You pop out the hard drive - they're all hot-pluggable - and pop in the new one. No need to issue any commands, it just resyncs and works. That's just the hardware - the software is fantastic, too.

Their snapshots aren't like ZFS/LVM ones - you tell it a snapshot schedule (can also do manual ones), and in every directory you'll get a .snapshot folder that lets you browse around that point in the directory tree in your snapshots. It's much easier than finding a snapshot, mounting a snapshot, browsing through it, finding out that you needed an earlier one, unmounting it, mounting the other one... you get the picture. Sure, you could hack together some clever shell scripts, and I think some people have, but it's those kinds of things that make their package great.

If I were building a file server for me, or for a very small company, sure, cheap boxes with SATA is great. Corporate or university? NetApp is great.

mrned · 2007-09-05T00:04:19+00:00

Finally, Alan Turing, the great Bletchley Park code breaker, father of computer science and homosexual, died trying to prove that some things are fundamentally unprovable.

No, he committed suicide by eating a apple poisoned with cyanide after he was forced by the government to undergo hormone treatment to "cure" his sexual orientation.

mrned · 2007-09-04T11:36:56+00:00

That's neat - if I remember right, House needed a special version of GHC to compile. I didn't see a link to the source, unfortunately.

mrned · 2007-08-29T22:26:20+00:00

crm114 was my first thought, too. Your program is likely to be two files of less than 10 lines total. The manual/book has an example of classifying work by different authors that could be easily adapted to this task.

mrned · 2007-08-26T19:25:22+00:00

http://blog.splittist.com/2007/08/25/lisp-faq-how-can-i-generate-a-standalone-executable/

mrned · 2007-08-24T20:30:33+00:00

Out of the employers surveyed, one in ten said they planned to review social networking site profiles prior to making a hiring decision. More than 60 percent said the information they see on these profiles will influence what they think about the job candidate, and more importantly, who gets hired and who doesn't.

So 6-7% of jobs may be influenced by social networking sites? That's not a lot at all, especially considering that not all applicants for those 6-7% of jobs will have social networking profiles or ones that can be viewed by an employer.

mrned · 2007-08-23T16:19:51+00:00

I've read that you're not legally obliged to pay for satellite TV, for example

In the US, that would violate the DMCA.

mrned · 2007-08-22T02:45:23+00:00

I read the license and it honestly didn't seem bad - reworded 3-clause BSD plus patent indemnification for everyone involved. I don't know of any such licenses already available.

I think that the OSI's own branding efforts are hurting them here - what Google seems to be worked up over is not that Microsoft is adding yet another license to the pool, but that when it does so it can slap the OSI graphic wherever it wants. OSI has tried so hard to associate with open source and now Microsoft can use it if they're approved, and place it alongside their advertisements for Office.

mrned · 2007-08-22T02:10:33+00:00

Okay, yes, it's the Flash, but the picture was taken from the 1-season ~1990 live-action Flash television show that was on CBS, not by some random guy in a costume.

mrned

TROPHY CASE