Pratt & Whitney, purveyors of jet engines for civilian and military applications, did a study on this many years ago, without actually intending to do the study. They went on the same metrics kick everyone else went on in the 1990s. They collected a bunch of data about their jet engine controller projects, including timecard … Read more
You may want to look at getting the latest edition of Head First C#. It’s particularly suited to newcomers – and it concentrates on “fun” examples rather than business-oriented ones. I’m not personally a fan of that style of learning, but it clearly suits a lot of other people. Make sure you buy either the … Read more
If you’re interested in compiler design (“how can computer understand what codes mean”), I highly recommend Dragon Book. I used it while in college and went as far as to create programming language myself.
The -1 is because integers start at 0, but our counting starts at 1. So, 2^32-1 is the maximum value for a 32-bit unsigned integer (32 binary digits). 2^32 is the number of possible values. To simplify why, look at decimal. 10^2-1 is the maximum value of a 2-digit decimal number (99). Because our intuitive … Read more
Type theory is a big area. First of all, the term “types” is a kind of a misnomer in computer science, for a few reasons, even though they are mostly used for the same basic idea. Types have arisen in many contexts, philosophy, computer science, and mathematics, for mostly the same reasons. The origin of … Read more
One of the things mentioned in talks by Martin Odersky on Scala is it being a language which scales well to tackle various problems. He wasn’t talking about scaling in the sense of performance but in the sense that the language itself can seem to be expanded via libraries. So that: val lock = new … Read more
#if DEBUG Console.WriteLine(“Debug version”); #endif #if !DEBUG Console.WriteLine(“NOT Debug version”); #endif See this.
Normally, the specific variable names that we chose in the lambda calculus are meaningless – a function of x is the same thing as a function of a or b or c. In other words: (λx.(λy.yx)) is equivalent to (λa.(λb.ba)) – renaming x to a and y to b does not change anything. From this, … Read more
I’m guessing that Matz wanted conceptual simplicity of “truthiness” as such – the only “false” values are false and nil. Period. Using just false would be the cleanest but there is understandable need for including nil. To include the integer zero as a special case might open the mental floodgates of questioning truthiness of other … Read more