Viewing profile — aardvark

Although a few high-level languages existed at the time, compilers back then were not capable of code optimization. The only way to write code tight enough to operate a spacecraft …

I went to college in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and I can testify that about 30-40% of the CS students were female. And even then some people were expressing concern about how…

>Furthermore, the stock market isn’t influenced by value today like it was thirty years ago. This simply isn't true. It was nearly 30 years ago that Warren Buffett published his ar…

This. And related to risk: When a website fails, it doesn't hurt anyone; if this tube were built, and then found to have a fatal design flaw, the liability would be enormous.

>Sure, if you have skills that are needed in Africa or Bangladesh, it's best to go there. But not everyone has such skills. That's the key. It sounds like Trigg has found a way to …

If a car has been on the lot a long time, then there's not a lot of interest in it. The dealer is more likely to accept any offer just to get it off the lot. For a car that's newly…

So, email corydoras@ridculousfish.com and he'll reply with a hint about his identity?

Or seawater marketed as fruit juice.

It looks great! One thing I'd like to see, if possible, is an adjustment to account for deficit spending. In other words, if the government is spending $175 for every $100 collecte…

Red Hat is making pretty good money supporting GPL'd software, over $700 million in FY 2010.

The cartoon notes that the comparison was taken from Neil Postman's book "Amusing Ourselves to Death". Postman wrote this 25 years ago. If anything, his observation is even more tr…

When I decided I was ready to move on from my last job, I went over to the library (2 blocks away) to update my resume during my lunch hour. I saw that the library had an opening f…

I'm not convinced corporations would necessarily hire more people due to lower tax rates. If sales forecasts don't look promising, the additional workers' net contribution may be n…

The copywriting is a little over the top, but my suggestion is for the book itself. I'd like to see more details. Your sample chapter on Lexers, for example, would be much stronger…

Yeah, as if he's going to sell 500 copies at $39.99.

That's exactly the situation we had at the place I used to work. Management believed it was better to deal with the limitations of legacy software than with the expense of moderniz…

Mel likely wrote the blackjack program before Kernighan ever offered that advice.

Good point. I wonder how much of that is due to the long period of peace and prosperity that the U.S. has experienced; in the absence of any serious external threats, it becomes ea…

True; the larger problem here is with the medium itself: Twitter does not provide room for context or nuance.

All I'm getting is "service unavailable"

It might be interesting to see the results of 15-20 iterations of this experiment, to see how perceptions differ over time.

I'm guessing the COBOL tweets are probably from people who primarily code in a different language, but still have that one legacy COBOL app that they still have to maintain.

Bytecode instructions?

Agreed about 40. That answer only works in English.