Year: 2006

Can Your Programming Language Do This? post by Joel Spolsky can give you some insight on why people use different programming languages, as well as provide you with some doubts on wheathere are you using the proper tool.

…programming languages with first-class functions let you find more opportunities for abstraction, which means your code is smaller, tighter, more reusable, and more scalable.

Both interesting and insightful. And I’m glad to confirm that I don’t have to switch from my primary programming language just yet.

If you work for a newspaper which, God forbid, haven’t yet embraced blogging, hurry to Doc Searls blog and read “Blogging for business” post. Even if you don’t work for a newspaper, go and read that post.

Slashdot had this post recently about data compression contest. Some Wikipedia data was used as a sample for this contest. And, as usual with compression discussions at Slashdot, there were a lot of humorous threads. I liked these three pathes in particular:

1. Steer away contest requirements from the lossless compression. If succeded, the whole Wikipedia encyclopedia could be compressed into 1 bit.
2. Use random data generation method (such as /dev/random device) to eventually generate the complete content back.
3. Use minimum size of compressed data (1 bit), while having an extremely large size of compression executable (the size of uncompressed data)