Comments for Alarming Development

Comment on Beautiful Code by artsrc

artsrc — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 03:48:33 +0000

One insight I think you hint at is that the code is not the full story and a beautiful system includes an environment that facilities analysis, new creation and change.

Comment on Beautiful Code by artsrc

artsrc — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 03:45:41 +0000

It is an important insight to note that it’s hard to write good code for a bad spec.

The existence of poor specifications is not so much an insurmountable barrier to great code, as a wonderful opportunity for us to make the world a better place.

The most effective way to improve the code is to improve the specification.

And structuring software around a commitment to an unchangeable imperfect specification creates a problem.

Comment on Beautiful Code by Beautiful Code « Random Precision

Beautiful Code « Random Precision — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 21:13:30 +0000

[...] Beautiful Code I find it immensely helpful to work on the assumption that I am too stupid to get things right. This leads me to conservatively use what has already been shown to work, to cautiously test out new ideas before committing to them, and above all to prize simplicity. via alarmingdevelopment.org [...]

Comment on Beautiful Code by headbiznatch

headbiznatch — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 19:25:41 +0000

apologies for this minor tangent…

truth be told, i sincerely enjoy looking at code in its various physical incarnations and containers: color coding, block nesting, camel casing, project explorers with trees of assemblies implicitly ordered by naming conventions, class diagrams, white board sketches, etc.; all the constructs that we developers use to tame the chaos, press the lever, and squeeze the lump of clay through the star-shaped stencil. i find that the code product explored in the environment of its creation often has a visual, narrative beauty in and of itself.

thanks to all for sharing your thoughts.

Comment on Beautiful Code by GR

GR — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 13:45:53 +0000

Thanks so much your writing!! As a newbie programmer I find a good deal of both consolation and inspiration in this piece. Thank you!

Comment on Too many cores, not enough brains by Interesting Reading… – The Blogs at HowStuffWorks

Interesting Reading… – The Blogs at HowStuffWorks — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 17:35:32 +0000

[...] Too many cores, not enough brains – “There are only two groups that want multicore…” [...]

Comment on Incompleteness by Jonathan Edwards

Jonathan Edwards — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 15:07:58 +0000

Thanks Sean, I’ll check it out.

Comment on Incompleteness by Sean McDirmid

Sean McDirmid — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 03:27:37 +0000

Maybe start here:

http://www.teknikus.dk/tj/gdc2001.htm

Its a very simple technique but easy to understand and implement. Their are more complicated techniques, like gauss seidel or split impulses, but it might not be useful to understand them to get a feel for the solution space.

I also think what you are doing might be related to general constraint programming…

Comment on Incompleteness by Jonathan Edwards

Jonathan Edwards — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 14:46:06 +0000

Thanks. I am totally ignorant of the field. Can you give me a pointer to a paper or text on these solvers?

Comment on Incompleteness by Jonathan Edwards

Jonathan Edwards — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 14:40:28 +0000

Thanks Paul, it is worth taking a look at Harel’s semantics to possibly learn some tricks. I doubt they address my problem though, because Statecharts assume it away: parallel state transitions are completely invisible to each other. Each transition must be a pure function of the prior state. I want to assemble synchronous dataflows within a step. Much harder.