Category Archives: software

Operating system 2

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To kind of explain what Linux is, you have to explain what an operating system is. And the thing about an operating system is that you’re never ever supposed to see it. Because nobody really uses an operating system; people use programs on their computer. And the only mission in life of an operating system is to help those programs run. So an operating system never does anything on its own; it’s only waiting for the programs to ask for certain resources, or ask for a certain file on the disk, or ask to connect to the outside world. And then the operating system steps in and tries to make it easy for people to write programs.

    * Interview in Revolution OS, documentary, 2001.

— Linus Torvalds

2010.12.27 Monday ACHK

Restore

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AES 256, 2 | Sequential speed, 2.2

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But let’s stop talking about “backups.” Doing a backup is too low a bar. Any experienced system administrator will tell you that they have a great backup plan, the trouble comes when you have to restore.

Let’s stop asking people if they’re doing backups, and start asking if they’re doing restores.

— by Joel Spolsky

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2010.12.25 Saturday ACHK

Richard Stallman | Bill Gates

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Patent trolls, it seems safe to say, are evil. I feel a bit stupid saying that, because when you’re saying something that Richard Stallman and Bill Gates would both agree with, you must be perilously close to tautologies.

— Paul Graham

2010.12.23 Thursday ACHK

Pure functions

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Along with not modifying data, our Haskell functions usually don’t talk to the external world; we call these functions pure.

— Real World Haskell

— by Bryan O’Sullivan, Don Stewart, and John Goerzen

2010.12.22 Wednesday ACHK

No syntax

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Lisp looks strange not so much because it has a strange syntax as because it has no syntax; you express programs directly in the parse trees that get built behind the scenes when other languages are parsed, and these trees are made of lists, which are Lisp data structures.

— Paul Graham

2010.12.20 Monday ACHK

Free for All

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Free for All: How Linux and the Free Software Movement Undercut the High-Tech Titans
by Peter Wayner

The pdf file of this book is available on the author’s website.
— Me@2010.12.18
2010.12.18 Saturday ACHK

Java, Perl, Python

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If you look at these languages in order, Java, Perl, Python, you notice an interesting pattern. At least, you notice this pattern if you are a Lisp hacker. Each one is progressively more like Lisp.

— Paul Graham

We were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp.

— Guy Steele, co-author of the Java spec

2010.12.17 Friday ACHK

Whole Internet User’s Guide and Catalog

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The Whole Internet User’s Guide & Catalog, by Ed Krol, was published in September 1992 by O’Reilly. The Los Angeles Times notes that the Whole Internet User’s Guide and Catalog was the “first popular book about the medium” and “was later selected by the New York Public Library as one of the most significant books of the 20th century.” The title and format were inspired by Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog.

— Wikipedia on Whole Internet User’s Guide and Catalog

2010.12.12 Sunday ACHK

The super evil trick

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One of the questions I get is, “My app is slow to start up. What are the super secret evil tricks you guys at Microsoft are using to get your apps to start up faster?” The answer is, “The super evil trick is to do less stuff.”

— “Five Things Every Win32 Programmer Needs to Know” (16 Sept. 2005)

— Raymond Chen

2010.12.08 Wednesday ACHK

Features 2

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If the user can’t find it, the function is not there.

— Human Factors International

It’s excellent advice. I still have this button clipped to my mug boss to periodically remind me that, no matter how cool the feature may be, if users can’t find it — or understand it — you’re wasting your time. So make sure you have your priorities in order before you start: usability first, feature second.

— Jeff Atwood

2010.12.06 Monday ACHK

Features

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    The answer to “Why doesn’t this feature exist?” is usually “By default features don’t exist. Somebody has to implement them.”

    It’s not like every feature you can think of comes out of your brain fully tested and implemented, and then some PM somewhere files a bug to have your feature removed. Features start out nonexistent and somebody has to make them happen.

    Raymond Chen
    23-JUN-2005
   

2010.12.05 Sunday ACHK

Hardware designers

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Also, when you are hardware designers, you have tremendously more discipline in writing and describing software because in hardware you cannot get it wrong.

— Bhatia

— Founders at Work

2010.12.04 Saturday ACHK

Apple II

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The Apple II really started the whole gaming industry, because it was the first time a computer had been built with sound, paddles, color, graphics—all the things for games. And it was really so that I could implement Breakout in software.

— Steve Wozniak

— Founders at Work

2010.12.03 Friday ACHK

Lambda calculus 2

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Prehistory

A few decades before modern computers were invented, the mathematician Alonzo Church developed a language called the lambda calculus. He intended it as a tool for investigating the foundations of mathematics. The first person to realize the practical connection between programming and the lambda calculus was John McCarthy, who created Lisp in 1958.

— Real World Haskell

— by Bryan O’Sullivan, Don Stewart, and John Goerzen

2010.12.01 Wednesday ACHK

Debugging

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Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.

— Brian Kernighan

2010.11.28 Sunday ACHK