COBOL as a Programming Language

I worked with COBOL near the end of my last contract and found aspects of it fascinating compared to today's languages. Everything is about structures that map directly to the bits on disk, with fine grain control on precision and data types. But then the language reads as a series of macros where you don't have to remember the low level details: do this to this, put this here, if this do that. It's also a terribly difficult language to parse because it was designed for ease of use by humans...

 Are Programming Solutions Inherent?

If you give two programmers the same problem—it depends on the problem, but problems of a more mathematical nature, they can often end up writing the same code. Subject to just formatting issues and relabeling the variables and the function names, it's isomorphic—it's exactly the same algorithms. Are we creating these things or are we just pulling the cobwebs off?

 Douglas Crockford on Reading Code

One of the things I've been pushing is reading. I think that is the most useful thing that a community of programmers can do for each other—spend time on a regular basis reading each other's code. Then are's a tendency in project management just to let the programmers go off independently and then we have the big merge and if it builds then we ship it and we're done and we forget about it.

 Peter Norvig: How Well Does the Program Run When it Isn't...

And think about failure modes—I remember one of the great lessons I got about programming was when I showed up at the airport at Heathrow, and there was a power failure and none of the computers were working. But my plane was on time. Somehow they had gotten print-outs of all the flights. 1 don't know where—there must have been some computer off-site, i don't know whether they printed them that morning or if they had a procedure of always printing them the night before and sending them ...

 About Science Online 2011

ScienceOnline2011 is the fifth annual international meeting on Science and the Web. On January 13-15th, 2011 the Research Triangle area of North Carolina will once again host scientists, students, educators, physicians, journalists, librarians, bloggers, programmers and others interested in the way the World Wide Web is changing the way science is communicated, taught and done. As in all the previous years, the meeting will be held in an ‘Unconference’ style – the Program is built befor...

 Hackers Subscribe to the Ontology of Science

Almost all hackers subscribe to the mechanistic, materialistic ontology of science (this is in practice true even of most of the minority with contrary religious theories). In this view, people are biological machines