11–20 of 129 posts
Also the burn in the beginning of EWD899 (not transcribed) is noteworthy:
A review of a paper in AI. I read "Default Reasoning as Likelihood Reasoning" by Elaine Rich. (My copy did not reveal where it had been published; the format suggests some conference proceedings. If that impression is correct, I am glad I did not attend the conference in question.
The most important one in the context of 2025 is this one: On the foolishness of "natural language programming". https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667...
I love that essay. It's such a joy to read, and even though it is very short and to the point it says so much both about the topic itself and society at large. And its just so obviously correct.
A while back someone posed EWD765 for an alternate solution, I don't recall if any other solution was found. That was my introduction to these.
I really enjoyed the this one: Some meditations on Advanced Programming https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD00xx/EWD32.... As I'm currently in a Functional Programming course in Haskell... This resonated. I know that we'll always need to write programs which directly interface with memory. However, when we don't need to do that... Maybe we shouldn't write programs in this style (i.e. imperative). Maybe w…
Generally I think this does answer the question about why functional languages don't dominate more than they do - although you could make an argument that JavaScript is a functional language, and it certainly is enjoying a lot of dominance these days. JS environments aren't known for being particularly efficient, though. To me, efficient use of resources is elegant, and a language needs to be able to do that.
The most important one in the context of 2025 is this one: On the foolishness of "natural language programming". https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667...
Seeing book sections or chapters starting with zero, always confuses me. I know that this convention is probably inspired by the fact that the addresses of memory locations start with zero. But that case was due to that fact one of the combination of the voltages can be all zeros. So, it's actually the count of combinations, and I don't think it can be used for ordinal enumeration of worldly things such as book chapt…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love that essay. It's such a joy to read, and even though it is very short and to the point it says so much both about the topic itself and society at large. And its just so obviously correct.
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Seeing book sections or chapters starting with zero, always confuses me. I know that this convention is probably inspired by the fact that the addresses of memory locations start with zero. But that case was due to that fact one of the combination of the voltages can be all zeros. So, it's actually the count of combinations, and I don't think it can be used for ordinal enumeration of worldly things such as book chapt…
There is however the zeroth element of a vector in most programming languages.
The most important one in the context of 2025 is this one: On the foolishness of "natural language programming". https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667...
Apparently Dijesktra loved using em-dash!