"873,020 pounds of sarin, 1,657,480 pounds of VX nerve agent and 1,976,760 pounds of mustard agent - enough to kill or incapacitate millions."... just one of America's stockpiles of chemical weapons

Don Knuth finally sold out.

Three Sins of Authors in Computer Science and Math

Word of the day:
desideratum: Something considered necessary or highly desirable

Subscriptions (see bottom of page) should be working again.

"A program generator (a meta-program) solves a particular problem by constructing another program (an object-program) that solves the problem at hand. Usually the generated (object) program is "specialized" for the particular problem and uses less resources than a general purpose, non-generator solution..." --Taxonomy of meta-programming systems

Unlambda: Your Functional Programming Language Nightmares Come True

TWiki, a flexible, powerful, and simple, secure, Web-based collaboration platform

Cameron Laird's personal notes on language comparisons

How do you reuse existing classes in a way the programmer had not originally considered?

"Ideally, one would like a module system that allows programmers to piece together chunks of code like tinker toys. The OCaml module system, like other ML variants, is a really solid step in that direction. It has structures, which are like classes but without inheritance, that collect and name a chunk of code. It has signatures, which are like interfaces, that simply have the code type signatures without the actual code. Finally, they have functors, which Java doesn't have, which allow programmers to write parameterized structures."

"The engineers are the creators of wealth; the VCs are the beneficiaries." --An Engineer's View of Venture Capitalists

"This fall, I hosted a two-day brainstorming session for 30 or so people... and in addition to the usual "sit around a big table and talk to each other" format, we set up an in-room chat channel accessible over the WiFi network... The in-room chat created a two-channel experience -- a live conversation in the room, and an overlapping real-time text conversation."

Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov (1858)

Richar Hamming's three questions for new hires at Bell Labs:

1. "What are you working on?" 2. "What's the most important open problem in your area?" 3. "Why aren't they the same?" (Ouch!)

Disruptive Programming Language Technologies

Brain prosthesis mimics hippocampus

The I Am The Greatest programmer "firmly believes that he is the greatest programmer to have walked the earth and has the three-line version of Tetris to prove it. He spent most of his undergraduate days in the terminal room and only got a degree because he could break security and decrypt the exam answers. Thinks in a mixture of C and assembly language, thinks Real Programmers are sissies, has memorised even the unwritten volumes of Knuth (who he believes sold out the moment he started writing TeX) and has most of the source to obsolete Unix kernels in his room"

The My Favorite Toy Language programmer "knows the solution to the problem. The only problem is, we haven't got a compiler for the language that it should be implemented in. MFTL knows only two languages; his favourite toy language and the language you need to compile its compiler. (If a language can compile its own compiler then it isn't a toy!)."

Academic Programmers: A Spotter's Guide

The Mail Archive: an archiving service for electronic mailing lists.

"Many people are wondering how our President George W. Bush went from a stumbling, error-prone, inarticulate speaker to a fairly coherent presenter, especially in the last 9 months..." --Bush The Articulate

Lovecraft's Pnakotic Manuscripts, Douglas Adam's Where God Went Wrong and Who is This God Person Anyway?, Borges' First Encyclopedia of Tlon and many others imaginary books listed in The Invisible Library

"Your latest article was so inspiring." #6 on The Top Ten Lies Told by Graduate Students