(The multi-month hiatus here on Monomorphic has been due to me working on my thesis. I am now able to, briefly, return to this and other indulgences.) Life presupposes taking responsibility. It presupposes investing people, objects and matters around you with your concern. In particular, democratic society presupposes that we all take full, in some […]
I’m in Portland, Oregon for the SPLASH conference. There’s a lot of energy and good ideas going around. I gave a talk about my project, Poplar, at the FREECO workshop. At the same workshop there was a very interesting talk given by Klaus Ostermann, outlining some of the various challenges facing software composition. He linked […]
New programming languages are released all the time. History is littered with dead ones. There are also many long time survivors in good shape, as well as geriatric languages on life support. What makes a programming language attractive and competitive? How can we evaluate its quality? There are many different aspects of this problem. Ease […]
It is likely that few features cause as much problems as pointers and references in statement-oriented languages, such as C, C++ and Java. They are powerful, yes, and they allow us to control quite precisely how a program is to represent something. We can use them to conveniently compose objects and data without the redundancy […]
This is an attempt at restating part of this old blog post in a simpler way. Scientists are valuable to society. They help extract new knowledge and theories about the world. To the extent that they are right, they improve our affluence, our physical health, and, possibly, our outlook on life. But scientists can also provide […]