Viewing profile — dianeb

Define what you mean by "everyone" -- there are times where the cost of immutability can be overwhelming, such as in high traffic systems with overly complex data structures which …

It's really difficult to plagiarize if you write the paper or take the exam in class using paper and pen-or-pencil. It's also difficult to plagiarize if the teacher/professor/TA ac…

I made a mistake. I'd like to blame it on my new mouse, but it was me. Thank you for pointing it. I regret the error and shan't make it again.

@dang, the "comments" (other than this one) are all from a bot.

This construct: string longestLine = [ argmax(line.strip.length) line for line in text.split("\n")]; print(longestLine); looks problematic to me -- are the brackets indicating scop…

As interesting as this article is as a comparison to a 40 year old supercomputer, the reality is that computers really are artifacts of an era and their place in the progress or re…

Once upon a time, NCR's mainframe language was called Neat (the version I briefly used was called Neat/3 which was a low-to-mid-level language if memory serves. I was writing compi…

Actually, it's also the job of lead or senior engineers who have to teach their experienced and educated teammates how to read and write a state diagram and how to use it in order …

Sure, this fits the way software evolves on the circle of dumb. It goes something like this: What a great idea!... (a little later) Hmmm. That's a problem... (later) We need someth…

For those who prefer reading books, there's always the precursor: _The_Nine_Tailors_ by Dorothy L Sayers. If you can find it, I believe there was a program or series called somethi…

MedicareAdvantage is one of those things where people say, "Oh. It's Medicare and it has all this extra stuff!" because living on basic Medicare is expensive and finding appropriat…

There is nothing useful here. Don't waste your time.

Yes architecture is important. Yes, there are various software models that may fit in the general case. Seeing this short list is semi-useful, but the key is knowing the problem yo…

Alas, the language is incredibly verbose in and of itself and the plethora of examples continue to be incredibly verbose. From _Java in a Nutshell_ to the latest documentation, the…

In C, you get what you pay for. When the platform changes, it's not unreasonable to recompile in order to take advantage of new hardware features. The OS is certainly different, ev…

Generalizations are such fun; when you say, "The intellectual rigor just isn't there in any humanities classes because most of the students shouldn't be in college at all" I think …

Well, "better" is a loaded word, and you need to remember that C++ is not a superset of C. The two languages intersect in a fairly large subset of C, but there are parts of C++ tha…

Somewhat surprisingly, clang 10's long double on a mac is implemented with 64 mantissa digits (bits) (LDBL_MANT_DIG = 64) so the information as presented is correct for clang on a …

I wrote C compilers for several large companies in the 80's and 90's. Everyone in a compiler group had something like this if for no other reason than to demonstrate why "bugs" wer…

This is Intel's 80-bit floating point. The reason the size is 128 is that it needs to align on a word boundary.