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Interviews
I’ve interviewed a lot of people looking for jobs at places where I work. I don’t think I’m a particularly good interviewer, but I have developed a few rules of thumb. The purpose of an interview is to see whether somebody can do the job. In my case, the job is programming. Past experience by…
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Salvation By Works
Now, a cute kid story. My daughter asked me why some people used to wear hair shirts and the like. I tried to explain about mortification of the flesh as a way to improve the spirit, how people tried to ignore their physical body to pursue a closer relationship with God. This naturally led to…
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Debt and Taxes
During the Reagan administration, the U.S. reduced tax rates and increased defense spending. The national debt as a percentage of overall GDP increased from 32.5% to 53.1% (Reagan called this increase in debt the “greatest disappointment” of his presidency). During the first Bush administration, it continued to rise, reaching 66.1%. During the Clinton administration, the…
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DejaGNU
Sorry for the long delay. Anyhow, I wrote that so that I could write this. DejaGNU is the test harness used by gcc, gdb, the GNU binutils, and probably other programs as well. Frankly, it’s a disaster. The documentation is weak, the implementation is complex and confusing, it’s slow, it does not support running tests…
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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…