Yesterday, John McCarthy, one of the fathers of modern computer programming passed away. John McCarthy may not have received as much notoriety among tech people as Steve Jobs did, but he was perhaps more influential. McCarthy developed LISP in 1959, based on Alonzo Church’s lambda calculus, for use in artificial intelligence research. My contact with …
Category Archive: Programming
Oct
24
Aug
12
Book Review : Why new systems fail
While I am not involved in the specific field, I found the book “Why New Systems Fail: Theory and Practice Collide” educational. This brief text is written in a casual style that makes it easy to read, while at the same time seeming less “professional” and less likely to be taken seriously by senior executives …
Feb
18
Why can’t the car adjust it’s own clock via GPS?
My wife has a nice new car that came with a built in GPS navigation system. While we find this to be a useful piece of technology, and the fact it has voice activation and all of that is rather amazing. But I’ve identified something missing that should have been quite simple for the programmers …
Mar
06
If I were a young ambitious computer scientist
I have an interest in computer science and programming, although my career path was only briefly related to this field. However, I frequent many computer programming sites and blogs like The Daily WTF, Coding Horror and programming.reddit.com. I have programming experience, albeit limited using languages like BASIC, Pascal, VB, Python and Common Lisp. I’m just …