Month: June 2008
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Science Museums
I’m back from vacation following the GCC summit. Since I was on vacation, I wonder: why are science and technology museums so often aimed at children, and art museums so often not? It’s as though science is naturally presented as educational, whereas art is something you simply appreciate. To me it would seem more natural…
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GCC Summit
I’m at the GCC Summit in Ottawa, and short on time. I gave a double presentation today, on gold (slides) and on writing gcc in C++ (slides).
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Space
No science fiction writer ever predicted what actually happened when we went to the Moon: we came home and never went back. Why did that happen? It happened because 1) going to the Moon is expensive and dangerous; and 2) after we got there once, there was nothing to gain by going there again. There…
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Public Development
Although it hasn’t been my habit to track other blogs closely, Ben Collins-Sussman wrote an interesting post about Programmer Insecurity. The gist of the post is that programmers need to share code early in the development process. They should not develop code in their own cave, and then unleash it on an unsuspecting world. This…
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Fast Development
I recall a Microsoft magazine ad from the mid-1980’s, back when Microsoft was best known for the compiler. The ad was four pages long. The first page said that their new development environment had the three things every programmer wanted. I didn’t use Microsoft tools in any case, but when I looked at that page,…