Month: December 2007

  • Sweeney Todd

    Sweeney Todd actually works better as a movie than on the stage, at least when Johnny Depp is on the screen. The music overcomes the staginess and melodrama of the story. Closeups make Sweeney Todd more tortured and less bombastic. On the other hand, I think that Angela Lansbury (who I’ve only seen in video)…

  • Create Inevitability

    I read an interesting article about Montenegro, a country which I know nothing about. Montenegro only recently became an independent country, after an election in 2006. (This was not the first time Montenegro was independent, but until the election it was joined with the much larger country of Serbia). The point of the article was…

  • Scheme

    I’ve written code in a number of different languages. The ones which I would say that I was or still am fluent in, in the sense of having written significant programs in them, are, approximately in order: Basic, FORTRAN, Cobol, Forth, APL, PL/1, Pascal, T, C, Common Lisp, Id, Scheme, sh, Tcl, C++. I’ve dabbled…

  • Programming in C/C++

    Why do people still write in C/C++? As many people have said over the years, C and C++ are sharp knives. Pointers and casts are the sharpest of the knives, and many people have run into difficult bugs in those areas. Java generally doesn’t have those problems. Why doesn’t everybody program in Java? The obvious…

  • Physical Laws

    Where do physical laws come from? Of course we can not know. We don’t even know if the physical laws are the same everywhere in the universe–we assume they are, but there is no way to be sure. In the absence of knowledge, we have to give up, or guess. My current favorite guess is…