Musings of the Technical Bard » Programming

R.I.P. John McCarthy

Taliesyn — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 04:14:30 +0000

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 …

Book Review : Why new systems fail

Taliesyn — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 06:41:58 +0000

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 …

Why can’t the car adjust it’s own clock via GPS?

Taliesyn — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 01:09:04 +0000

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 …

If I were a young ambitious computer scientist

Taliesyn — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 01:17:34 +0000

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 …