Everyone can recognize some kinds of spurious reasoning – like the following: (A) Most programmers are not great. (B) Google tries to hire only excellent programmers (C) A implies B is hopeless and counterproductive and demoralizing Clearly, step (C) is
Sorting and groups
I can’t find much reference to this in the literature (see Maus for some hints and an interesting paper) , but surely people have looked at sorting as a problem in group theory? Given a sequence $latex s=[x_1\dots x_n] $
C compiler developers are hostile to C programming
From the LLVM developer mailing list this remarkable exchange in which Chris Lattner of LLVM says that the compiler use of undefined behavior (UB) is so “crappy” that the only solution is to abandon C programming (my bold). On Jul
Current reading: July 8 2017
Principal type-schemes for functional programs∗ Luis Damas† and Robin Milner First published in POPL ’82: Proceedings of the 9th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages, ACM, pp. 207–212 THE PRINCIPAL TYPE-SCHEME OF AN OBJECT IN COMBINATORY LOGIC BY
The C standard versus C and the mother of all hacks.
The Kafkaesque interaction of the C standard and the main open source C compilers was concisely outlined by one of the main LLVM authors back in 2011: “knowing that INT_MAX+1 is undefined allows optimizing X+1 > X to “true”. Knowing
The C standard committee effort to kill C continues
Consider the following code: void f(void) { unsigned char x[1]; /* intentionally uninitialized */ x[0] ^= x[0]; printf(“%d\n”, x[0]); printf(“%d\n”, x[0]); return; } In this example, the unsigned char array x is intentionally uninitialized but cannot contain a trap representation because it has a
Basic math for basic algorithms
It’s odd that all the descriptions of basic programming operations, such as sorting, rely on pseudo code or complex formal logic. All we are doing is modifying finite sequences so it seems like we should be able to use ordinary
Computer Science as a scholarly discipline.
Google Scholar tells me that “Why Functional Programming Matters” was published in 1989 and has been cited over 1000 times. Here’s a quote. Recall that a complete functional program is just a function from its input to its output. If
Current reading
Wadler’s influential “monads” paper for Haskell. It seems like a classic case of making something simple sound profound and mysterious. And companion paper by Hughes on “why functional programming matters” . See also some comments above. McCarthy’s original LISP paper. Just
Chang-Maxemchuk atomic broadcast
The Chang-Maxemchuk algorithm (US Patent 4,725,834 ) solves atomic broadcast (and in-order broadcast) problems for distributed networks in a far simpler and more efficient way than some popular alternatives. In fact, the obscurity of this method is hard to understand given the