Academics and practitioners, having rather different goals in life, tend to approach software development in quite different ways. No doubt there are many things each side of the fence can learn from the other, but I think academics in particular could often benefit quite a lot by adopting some of the practices used in industrial […]
Here’s something I’ve wanted to see for some time, but probably don’t have time to work on myself. It would be nice if there was a wikipedia-like web site for code and algorithms. Just the common ones to start with, but perhaps more specialised ones over time. Of course the algorithms should be available in […]
Following a comment on my previous foray into bibliography management systems, I had a look at the product known as Mendeley. In order to evaluate Mendeley, let’s ask ourselves what we want from a bibliography management system in the modern research environment. At a bare minimum, we want an easy way to catalogue and search […]
I use the tool Evernote on my iPhone and my desktop computers. It’s pretty nice. You can upload “notes” such as PDFs or images from your desk or from the phone, and the software makes them all searchable and syncs all data between all the different places where you use it. It OCRs photos, so […]
Following up on yesterday’s post on code reuse, I have a more specific reason to be skeptical of literate programming. Programming and software development is stuck in a textual paradigm – the idea that programming is something you do by writing text in a formal language. I think this idea constrains us somewhat in the […]