Month: March 2011

  • Tcl

    Around 1997 I had did quite a bit of programming in the Tcl language, as part of an IDE project at Cygnus. The project failed, for several reasons, but here I’m going to write about Tcl. I don’t hear much about Tcl these days, although it was fairly popular in its day. Tcl is a…

  • Cross-compilation

    GCC fully supports cross-compilation: building a program on one machine in order to run it another. However, it’s quite painful to actually build a full cross-toolchain with compiler, tools, and libraries. Many people new to the process have the same reaction: it simply can’t be this hard. But it is. The basic problem is that…

  • 8 1/2

    My favorite movie has long been Fellini’s 8 1/2. It’s a movie which seems designed to appeal to a computer programmer: it’s self-referential and recursive, a movie about the making of itself. It’s also about the difficulties of the creative process, and that is where it resonates most strongly with me. The director in the…

  • Copying

    It’s interesting that the U.S. economy has moved away from manufacturing at the same time as computers have made it very easy to copy digital goods. We see the U.S. pushing China hard to enforce their copyright laws, because much of what the U.S. has to sell is easily copied. The U.S. has developed great…