Viewing profile — ericsink

Interesting. I left Spyglass in January 1997, just as they were heading in that general direction.

I don't remember anything about "Microsoft Mosaic" as a name, but we definitely retained the right for Spyglass to sell our own browsers. In my recollection, the initial payment fr…

Based on my understanding, some of the details he gave about the Spyglass/Microsoft situation are not quite right, but I don't think it would appropriate for me to provide specific…

Shameless self-promotion: https://wordmax.game Released for public preview just today. Game play similar to Scrabble, but played "duplicate" style. Admittedly not exactly "quick lo…

I too miss discriminated unions in C#. But even more often, I find myself wishing C# blocks were expressions. In F#, I could do this: let x = let z = whatever ... value and z is in…

(Author here) Well this is a blast from the past. Back when I wrote this, I kinda hoped F# would surprise me and gain more traction than I expected. But 8 years later, if anything,…

None of those are working yet. I'm hoping to get things going with MAUI. But I've made some progress with Avalonia. Here's a sample using Native AOT and Avalonia, with a projection…

(Author here) Most of the buzz about .NET Native AOT is focused on things like startup time for compiled executables in cloud environments. For good reason. But Native AOT also sup…

Indeed. I've been using the .NET 8 previews with Native AOT on an M1 Mac for several weeks, and things work quite nicely.

I like the warnings about style and naming conventions. I kinda wish there were more of them. These warnings can help teams avoid arguments about things that don't really matter ve…

Note also that the Meteor project has "minimongo", which is yet another implementation of the MongoDB query language.

FWIW, I've recently been implementing the MongoDB query language as well: https://github.com/zumero/Elmo In F#. Not even remotely close to usable or production-ready. The approach …

I think maybe the most interesting open source companies today are Couchbase and Mongo. AFAICT, everything Couchbase does is Apache Licensed. An old-school traditionalist could loo…

And, er, nevermind that comment. It's redundant. Lesson learned: Don't comment until you RTFA, even if you wrote TFA.

The original business for Spyglass was scientific visualization tools. When we did our "pivot" into web browsers, the company name stayed the same. The science tools were sold to B…

I should have chosen law as my example. No matter what I chose, it would be wrong, but picking on lawyers is more fashionable.

I like to think that by expressing my opinion and labeling it as such, I am meeting the [very low] expectations set by a blog entry at a URL with my name in it. :-) The McConnell l…

Er, yeah, time is linear, but I don't think the distribution of runners is. I bet there's a bell curve there, and Usain Bolt is WAY, WAY off on the right part of the curve.

Indeed. If software truly mirrors sports in this regard, we might want to think of elites as a once-per-generation thing. But it is also interesting to consider the possibility tha…

One of the commenters over on reddit gave an example of the kind of person who might be considered an elite accountant.

IIRC this was beaten later by Steven Gordon's GADDAG algorithm. Edit: yep. Fixed name. Here's the Wikipedia link: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GADDAG

Fair point. There will still be some very, very large scale problems in the B2B wave. If I weren't trying to keep the wording of my blog entry so tight, I would have more clearly d…

Yeah, I'm saying that this is one of the issues that brought the popularity of nosql databases. Constraints are expensive, and you can gain performance (while accepting greater ris…

Well, I'm guessing Foxconn is the biggest by some measure. ;-)

Exactly. And very well said.