Rafe Colburn explains why Algol-like languages are far superior to Perl for working on large scale, multi-programmer, long-term projects. I'd go further. If you use an outliner to edit your source code, his multi-line Java example shrinks down to one line, just like his Perl example. If you don't program in an outliner I'm sure you have no idea what I just said. If you do, you're probably chortling and guffawing and pointing at the screen saying "See what I said." [Scripting News]

For what it's worth, both the Perl and Java in the linked article are wrong. The correct solution in both cases is to write a function "dirDepth" or something that takes a path and counts the depth, then call that function. The Java one may be more complicated-looking, but that's OK. The original Blosxom solution unnecessarily ties the program to the UNIX platform, which is the only one you can depend on for '/' to be the path delimiter with no exceptions.

Please ignore if you're not into computing theory.

Says Den Beste:

My original statement was that a single Turing machine cannot perfectly simulate a system which consists of two Turing machines such that the ratio of the clock rates for those two Turing machines is a transcendental number.... [attempted proof clipped] ... Am I right? ... Can my proposed idea be restated in a way which truly does make it uncomputable?

When do you know that you've got the right answer to a programming conundrum? When the answer means you delete lots of code, and the final product is more efficient, more flexible, and more robust. I love programming.

I don't want this to turn into a political 'blog ("warblog") but I have a few comments to make, focused by an article by ex-President Carter. I'll try to make sure the points are "fresh"... i.e., I haven't seen them made elsewhere. I assume you read the article first.

The war can be waged only as a last resort, with all nonviolent options exhausted. In the case of Iraq, it is obvious that clear alternatives to war exist.

For those who don't track Slashdot, a very interesting review of a book carefully studying the feasibility of a Space Elevator was posted.

For those who don't know what a space elevator is, here's the basics: A satellite is put in geosynchronous orbit around the earth, which is where the satellite always stays above the same point on Earth. A tether from the satellite is extended down to the surface of the Earth, and another is extended away from the Earth a roughly equal distance.

The next generation of News Aggregators should use Bayesian-style filtering to allow a user to indicate what kind of stories they like. Possibly even sorting them out by categories, because you may not be able to capture my preferences in a single filter.

This is not a new idea any more then Bayesian email filtering is, but perhaps the focus it has received in the email filtering role will encourage people to recognize its power in other applications as well.

I've spent most of today moving stuff from the house to the third dumpster. If the stuff in the house was that valuless, in a sense I was living in a dumpster. Most of the stuff I'm throwing away now, on shelves, in the house, had not been touched in years. I got a clue about this when I spent most of the last quarter of 2002 in New York. I did pretty well with a suitcase, knapsack, laptop and cellphone. There really wasn't much more that I needed, or much more that I could even use.... I realize I probably would be happier with a really nice room, a large one, with a deck and a hot tub, bathroom and shower, and access to a kitchen for the rare times I create a meal, and that's about it. Having a car is nice, but I don't need anything on the order of the kinds of possessions that have accumulated in this very nice house-dumpster. [Scripting News]

I was raised middle-class to upper-middle-class (in later years as my father progressed). I always wondered how I'd do being much less well off when I lived on my own while I was going to college and getting my grad degree. And the answer has pleasently surprised me; I'm quite happy the way things are, with a two-bedroom apartment and a quite modest amount of stuff.

My laptop just self-immolated. Other then the fact that the warrentee repairs will take "up to three weeks", am I saddened? Nope. I finally got a decent backup scheme going, and I only lost perhaps a sum total of an hour of work.

It is likely that the repair technicians will not have to wipe the hard drive (unless the sight of Linux freaks them out when they fix it), but even so, I'm not afraid of data loss, because I've got it all right here.

Continuing the spammer's march to make sure that e-mail is 100% useless soon, I recently received a spam with this title: "Please return immediately, or we will be forced to take legal notice". Can you afford to ignore that, in light of the fact that electronic notice is sometimes sufficient, IIRC? (Though the last word should be "action".) It's a porn spam.

It is getting harder every month to visually scan my spam and reliably seperate them by title.

256 days since I quit smoking. Yeah, I'm a programmer. Sue me. [Scripting News]

For non-programmers, 256 happens to be two raised to the power of eight, which is the number of distinct bytes that exist (a byte is eight bits, which is either a one or a zero).

Incoming computer science students no longer know their powers of two. Even most of my contemporary grad students don't know their powers of two. Those of us who instantly know 32,768 is 2¹⁵ are a dying breed. Heck, most grad students don't even seem to know the 2¹⁰ =~ 10³ (where =~ means "approximentally equal)... I see something like 2⁵⁵ and I know quite quickly that is approximentally 32 quadrillion, close enough for government work.