General Development Archive

What is the future of programming? I retain a romantic belief in the potential of scientific revolution. To recite one example, the invention of Calculus provided a revolutionary language for the development of Physics. I believe that there is a “Calculus of programming” waiting to be discovered, which will analogously revolutionize the way we program. Notation does matter." More here.

"Concurrent programming is difficult, yet many technologists predict the end of Moore's law will be answered with increasingly parallel computer architectures - multicore or chip multiprocessors. If we hope to achieve continued performance gains, programs must be able to exploit this parallelism. Automatic exploitation of parallelism in sequential programs, through either computer architecture techniques such as dynamic dispatch or automatic parallelization of sequential programs, offers one possible technical solution. However, many researchers agree that these automatic techniques have been pushed to their limits and can exploit only modest parallelism. Thus, programs themselves must become more concurrent."

Adam Dunkels, well-known author of the Contiki operating system and the uIP embedded TCP/IP stack, has written a really small BASIC interpreter called uBASIC in about 700 lines of C code. It is intended to be a very small scripting language for systems where memory really is at a premium such as deeply embedded systems which may have as little as a few hundreds of bytes of RAM. It provides an interesting look into how to write a very lightweight script interpreter.

"The GNU Linear Programming Kit is a powerful, proven tool for solving numeric problems with multiple constraints. Get an introduction to GLPK, the glpsol client utility, and the GNU MathProg language to help find the best solutions to complex numeric problems. Then, learn to solve the problem of optimizing the operations for Giapetto's Woodcarving, Inc., a fictional toy manufacturer."

Borland Software's Developer Tools Group is moving back to the company's roots and relaunching its Turbo brand of products - offering the tools both for beginners and nonprogrammers, as well as for professionals. Borland officials said the company is bringing back its Turbo brand of tools as a set of low-cost, language-specific rapid application development tools for students, hobbyist developers, occupational developers and individual programming professionals.

Robert Love posted in his blog some interesting screenshots: Thanks to beaglefs, a FUSE-based filesystem written by him that creates a real filesystem subtree from the results obtained from a beagle query) he was able to get a "people" subdirectory, with subdirectories named as your contacts, icons, and inside every directory links to all the documents related with that contact.