Cognitive Dissonance and IQ
There’s something I’ve never understood about people: how some (most?) people will adopt a specific position about a subject, and thereafter simply won’t be able to comprehend any argument to the contrary.
Archive of posts filed under the Software and Software Development category.
Topics pertaining to software and software development, mostly for Microsoft Windows or Linux, and mostly in C or C++.
“Strategy Letter VI”
Joel Spolsky, of Joel on Software fame, has been in the computer industry for a long time. He’s also a smart fellow who knows how to write, and he has just posted an insightful article on where it looks to him like the computer industry is headed. If you’re in charge of your software company’s …
The True Power of Lisp
In my previous post, I discussed a very minor thing that I thought should be simple to do with a Lisp macro, but that I’d been working on for the better part of a week without success. As I’ve said before, once I run into a problem, I can’t leave it alone — I pound …
Lisp Macro Confusion
From everything I’ve read, Lisp’s macros are most useful for abstracting commonly-used patterns. Well, I quickly noticed a pattern that seemed ripe for abstraction, but after trying to do so for the better part of a week, I haven’t met with any notable success.
Emacs=Escape-Meta-Alt-Control-Sh*t
I tried. I really did. I gave it more than a week, but at the risk of turning Geek Drivel into the latest battleground in the editor holy wars, I found that I just can’t stand the venerable and much-venerated editor known as emacs. I’m sure that emacs aficionados will say that a week simply …
I’m Officially a Lisp Developer Now
After spending a week and a half studying both the PDF version of Seibel’s Practical Common Lisp and my copy of Graham’s ANSI Common Lisp (comparison coming soon), I coded up some algorithms for the next Project X prototype in the language yesterday.
I surrender — Lisp really is better than C++
I’ve been using C and C++ for over twenty years now, and I’m very fluent in both of them. C++ has been my preferred language for pretty much any programming task for most of that time, and I haven’t seen any point to learning other programming languages because some of them are at best equivalent …
Continue reading ‘I surrender — Lisp really is better than C++’ »
Preparing to LISP
Greenspun’s Tenth Rule of Programming: any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp. — Philip Greenspun Including Common Lisp. — Robert Morris I’ve been working on a top-secret, ultra-hush-hush project for my company for several years now — so secret that I can …
Fun, and How To Have It
I’ve always felt a certain kinship to the character of Sherlock Holmes. Not for his ability to notice the most minute of details, or his reasoning skills, or his undeniable flair for disguise… admirable as those and many of his other traits may be, it’s his moods between cases that I’ve always identified with.
The OS Wars II: Program Pontification
As reported earlier, I’m trying to write a C++ program to let me know whether my backup program is working properly or not.