Viewing profile — gigamonkey

Hey, thanks everyone for your kind comments on the book. Kinda amazing that we're only a few years away from it's 20th anniversary. -Peter

Totally. I had been thinking about writing a Haskell book but it seems that space is maybe well covered lately.

Well, these days I'm working at Twitter on our abuse problem. So that keeps me pretty busy. I did write another book, Coders at Work, a book of interviews with notable programmers.…

I plan to. Some day.

As I think I mentioned in the interview, I've found that if I do this, by the time I'm done with my rewrite, I actually understand the original code too. So if I had to, I could th…

I believe Mesa did. On the other hand, Stroustrup claims (in the Design and Evolution of C++, I think) that the Cedar system written in Mesa basically never used the ability to res…

You should check out the book The Myth of the Paperless Office. They report research where they gave folks tasks like writing a summary of several magazine articles and one group d…

Of course in this case Amazon is in the middle, right? Suppose publishers demand to be paid by usage. Amazon can still charge their customers a flat fee--it just moves the risk of …

By "source materials" presumably he means the raw transcripts of the interviews, etc. Which doesn't seem too likely but it's at least possible.

Indeed, if you are interested in exploring interesting ways of publishing stuff with great design, get in touch with Adam; he's awesome.

Part of the problem may have been that I was coming more from a perspective of book publishing--the original idea was that CQ articles would be more like short books rather than lo…

I don't know what, if anything, is going on at Berkeley, but Hal Abelson talked quite a bit about the switch from SICP to a different intro course at MIT when I interviewed him for…

But would a test case be a good example of using the code? As in, good for the purpose of understanding the code.

I'm curious what folks do who follow the no-qualified-headers rule. When they have things that act like headers but which need to be styled differently than the single header style…

But you can tolerate ref counting pauses? (When you release the last reference to the last object keeping a large tree of objects alive and have a lengthy cascade of objects being …

Haven't gotten around to it yet. Definitely on the list.

Another similar story, from my interview with Guy Steele in Coders at Work: This may seem like a terrible waste of my effort, but one of the most satisfying moments in my career wa…

According to Ken Thompson, yes: "Stroustrup campaigned for years and years and years, way beyond any sort of technical contributions he made to the language, to get it adopted and …

Last I knew, CLISP was based on a bytecode VM while SBCL and Clozure generate machine code. I think there may be some work on adding a JIT to CLISP but as far as I know it's still …

> He has never taken a non-academic job in his life; That's not quite right. He did at least consulting work outside of academia. As I quote him in Coders at Work: "For example, so…

I'm pretty sure this is false. As I understand it hunters and gatherers lived about as long as we do. It was only with the invention of agriculture and the kind of societies (and d…

Uh, they use beagles for sniffing for all kinds of things: drugs, bombs, even termites. That said, German Shepherds are an interesting case because, as I understand it, their breed…

Interesting. I've written two books for Apress and got essentially zero editorial help from them. A handful of writers I've talked to published by other tech publishers reported si…

Regarding the "hunks" he mentioned, here's what Guy Steele had to say about them when I interviewed him for Coders at Work: "I implemented a new data type called a 'hunk,' which wa…