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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…
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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…
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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…
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Götterdämmerung Capitalism
When capitalism is working well, it unleases the creativity of everybody in society. Because capitalism specifically rewards people who do what other people want, and because it gives everybody the freedom to try and fail, the effect is that society as a whole gets steadily better at giving people what they want. Of course, that…
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C++ Threads
I went to a talk by Hans Boehm about threads in C++. He was mostly discussing the plans for the future C++0x standard. He said it was important to get threads right, even though they are hard to use correctly, because they would most likely be the base for any other multi-processing paradigm. That seems…