gigamonkey

5 ms·

1.
by gigamonkey 5y ago
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
2.
by gigamonkey 10y ago
Totally. I had been thinking about writing a Haskell book but it seems that space is maybe well covered lately.
3.
by gigamonkey 10y ago
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 kind of suspect that if I write another book (as I h
4.
by gigamonkey 10y ago
I plan to. Some day.
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by gigamonkey 14y ago
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 throw away my new (better?) code and still benefit from a bett
6.
by gigamonkey 15y ago
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 restart as a reason why C++ doesn't have continuable exceptions
7.
by gigamonkey 15y ago
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 did it all on a computer and the other did it on paper and th
8.
by gigamonkey 15y ago
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 mis-setting the flat fee onto Amazon rather than the publish
9.
by gigamonkey 15y ago
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.
10.
by gigamonkey 15y ago
Indeed, if you are interested in exploring interesting ways of publishing stuff with great design, get in touch with Adam; he's awesome.
11.
by gigamonkey 15y ago
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 long blog posts. And books you are paid by quarterly royalties
12.
by gigamonkey 15y ago
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 Code Quarterly http://www.codequarterly.com/2011/hal-abels
13.
by gigamonkey 15y ago
But would a test case be a good example of using the code? As in, good for the purpose of understanding the code.
14.
by gigamonkey 15y ago
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 used on the site, do they just use classed P's or DIV's? Co
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by gigamonkey 15y ago
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 freed.)
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by gigamonkey 15y ago
Haven't gotten around to it yet. Definitely on the list.
17.
Interview with Hal Abelson on Code Quarterly(codequarterly.com)
94 points by gigamonkey 15y ago|8 comments
18.
by gigamonkey 15y ago
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 was when I realized that I had found a way to shave one word o
19.
by gigamonkey 15y ago
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 used. And he sort of ran all the standards committees with a
20.
by gigamonkey 15y ago
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 experimental.
21.
by gigamonkey 16y ago
> 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, some of the best work I did for Burroughs Corporation was
22.
by gigamonkey 16y ago
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 diseases) it enabled, that our average lifespan took a nosedi
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by gigamonkey 16y ago
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 standard is actually a behavioral standard: they have to be
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by gigamonkey 16y ago
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 similar experiences to mine. Glad to hear they're doing someth
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by gigamonkey 16y ago
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 was probably the biggest disaster in language design we ever p
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by gigamonkey 16y ago
I've had a similar experience, lately while writing and editing pieces for Code Quarterly--I've written the same basic algorithms in Javascript, Python, and Common Lisp to play around with them. I find the Python the best vehicle for convey
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by gigamonkey 16y ago
Yeah. I'm not crazy about the XML thing either (as I noted in a footnote) but all we're using it for is a trivial way to dump an AST that's easy to specify.
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by gigamonkey 16y ago
I could imagine this being useful for journalism--you're interviewing someone and recording the whole thing but taking notes about particularly interesting bits. Now it's easy to jump from the notes to the audio recording.
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Code Quarterly looking for writers(codequarterly.wordpress.com)
4 points by gigamonkey 16y ago|0 comments
30.
by gigamonkey 17y ago
Did you enter an email address? (And possibly leave the field after you've entered it?)

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