You Don't Need No @!#% Tests If You Are Knuth

Thu, 10 Mar 2011 02:51:00 GMT

Dick Lipton on Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP: Knuth began to explain how he wrote the first version of TeX. My faculty colleagues began to become more and more uncomfortable as Knuth spoke. The high level version of what he said was:
I sat down and started to type in the entire program in Pascal. After X hours the entire system was entered. Then I tried to compile it all. After fixing a few syntax errors the system compiled. I then tried to typeset a sample piece of TeX. Again after fixing a few errors I got this all to work...

JetBrains Is Working On IDE for Objective-C

Tue, 30 Nov 2010 05:23:00 GMT

(Via InfoQ.)

Ann Oreshnikova: We have already unveiled some of our plans :-) Yes, an Objective-C IDE is already in the works and on its way to go public. We’re also giving a lot of consideration to C++.

Brian was just talking about how XCode is not as nice as IntelliJ IDEA today. I asked him "Does IDEA support Objective-C?" The answer was "No."

Well, they are working on a whole IDE for it!

Java, Sun, Oracle, ...

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 14:16:34 GMT

This has been an eventful week in the tech world. Two events stood out: one is an upbeat look into the future—of PC-less computing/entertaining with Apple's new iPad; one is a painful look back at some once also world-alteringly-new technologies from Sun—having found a new home at Oracle.

The Sun/Oracle news hits closer to home.

If you haven't been paying attention to all the accounts in the press and in blogs, all you have to do is to visit http://www.sun.com/ to realize that the world has changed.

I'm grateful to Oracle for its announced strategies for Java, JavaFX, OpenOffice, etc.

For Java, it would seem that it will be business as usual. In answering a question at the event, Larry Ellison essentially said that "Oracle is making money with Java" with it's middleware products and applications, so the pressure to make money off of Sun's Java products is an non-issue.

Oracle will also invest heavily in JavaFX. Jim Weaver has a more detailed account on that front:

Jim Weaver: In the live Oracle/Sun Strategy webcast, I heard encouraging statements like:

We will invest heavily in JavaFX

Significant investment will be made in JavaFX; focus on designers; fusion of DHTML, JavaScript, Java, JavaFX

The JavaPosse spells out the JavaScript link to JavaFX more succinctly in Episode #295:

Tor (17:07): JavaFX appears to have a rosy future. They said they would invest in it aggressively. It's going to be developed across all platforms, including embedded. And they also announced that there are plans to make SceneGraph access available from JavaScript.
Carl: Very cool.
Tor: That's been one of the criticisms for people who haven't learned JavaFX the language. You don't want to learn the new language. You don't see the point, right. So the idea here is that you can still take advantage of the APIs in the SceneGraph, even from JavaScript.
Carl: That's wild. That really gives it an advantage over all of the competition.

If you come here for the Friday quiz instead of all of the above, here's one:

Q: In which language is the following program written? Who invented the language? Will it compile? Run without errors? What does it print?

package main

import "fmt"

func main() {
  fmt.Printf("Hello, 世界\n")
}

Weiqi Gao's Observations - programming tag

You Don't Need No @!#% Tests If You Are Knuth

JetBrains Is Working On IDE for Objective-C

Java, Sun, Oracle, ...