The headline manufactures drama from the contrast between "8.7% market share [in units sold]" and 75% of profits. This is the silly part of the coverage. It's not Dediu's fault that Elmer-Dewitt at CNN Money chose to be…
I don't doubt that Apple has vastly greater profits than any of its competitors, but stats like this are cooked to make the ratio seem even more impressive than it already is. The notion that a feature phone and an…
Abstractions are partial and leaky models of the thing they abstract over. When you build your system as a tall, skinny tower of small abstractions, you are trading one problem for another. Eventually you will need to…
Structural subtyping is not OO? Somewhere Luca Cardelli is scratching his head.
Bruce Sterling said some similar stuff in the Last Viridian Note, and he said it far better: http://www.viridiandesign.org/notes/451-500/the_last_viridia... It's a little unfortunate that viridiandesign.org is basically…
English? Hah. I'm against the whole patent charade but if we're going to grant them, the inventors should be forced to disclose the entire goddamn source code, development infrastructure, and version control repository…
The second example should actually be class C { void mightFail() { ... } ~C() { doCleanup(); } }; C c; c.mightFail(); Anyway, I hate this slide deck so much. 1. The author's point could be made in far fewer slides. As…
Thread hijack... If you use Emacs all day on a Mac, what do you use for the Meta key? I find I'm not really happy no matter what I do. If I make Option into Meta, I have to bend my thumb way under my palm to hit Meta.…
In 2004 Bacon et al. showed that tracing GC and ref-counting GC are special cases of a more general framework, and that it is possible to combine them to get the benefits of both. See "A Unified Theory of Garbage…
The headline manufactures drama from the contrast between "8.7% market share [in units sold]" and 75% of profits. This is the silly part of the coverage. It's not Dediu's fault that Elmer-Dewitt at CNN Money chose to be…
I don't doubt that Apple has vastly greater profits than any of its competitors, but stats like this are cooked to make the ratio seem even more impressive than it already is. The notion that a feature phone and an…
Abstractions are partial and leaky models of the thing they abstract over. When you build your system as a tall, skinny tower of small abstractions, you are trading one problem for another. Eventually you will need to…
Structural subtyping is not OO? Somewhere Luca Cardelli is scratching his head.
Bruce Sterling said some similar stuff in the Last Viridian Note, and he said it far better: http://www.viridiandesign.org/notes/451-500/the_last_viridia... It's a little unfortunate that viridiandesign.org is basically…
English? Hah. I'm against the whole patent charade but if we're going to grant them, the inventors should be forced to disclose the entire goddamn source code, development infrastructure, and version control repository…
The second example should actually be class C { void mightFail() { ... } ~C() { doCleanup(); } }; C c; c.mightFail(); Anyway, I hate this slide deck so much. 1. The author's point could be made in far fewer slides. As…
Thread hijack... If you use Emacs all day on a Mac, what do you use for the Meta key? I find I'm not really happy no matter what I do. If I make Option into Meta, I have to bend my thumb way under my palm to hit Meta.…
In 2004 Bacon et al. showed that tracing GC and ref-counting GC are special cases of a more general framework, and that it is possible to combine them to get the benefits of both. See "A Unified Theory of Garbage…