2011

Links for December 13th through December 19th

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My shared links for December 13th through December 19th:

This book's goal is to change that. In it, the authors of twenty-five open source applications explain how their software is structured, and why. What are each program's major components? How do they interact? And what did their builders learn during their development? In answering these questions, the contributors to this book provide unique insights into how they think.

If you are a junior developer, and want to learn how your more experienced colleagues think, this book is the place to start. If you are an intermediate or senior developer, and want to see how your peers have solved hard design problems, this book can help you too.

  • An Empirical Comparison of the Accuracy Rates of Novices using the Quorum, Perl, and Randomo Programming Languages - It will never work in theory - We present here an empirical study comparing the accuracy rates of novices writing software in three programming languages: Quorum, Perl, and Randomo. The first language, Quorum, we call an evidence-based programming language, where the syntax, semantics, and API designs change in correspondence to the latest academic research and literature on programming language usability. Second, while Perl is well known, we call Randomo a Placebo-language, where some of the syntax was chosen with a random number generator and the ASCII table. We compared novices that were programming for the first time using each of these languages, testing how accurately they could write simple programs using common program constructs (e.g., loops, conditionals, functions, variables, parameters). Results showed that while Quorum users were afforded significantly greater accuracy compared to those using Perl and Randomo, Perl users were unable to write programs more accurately than those using a language designed by chance

Links for November 27th through December 1st

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My shared links for November 27th through December 1st:

  • The Acme User Interface for Programmers -

  • UF Sparse Matrix Collection - SNAP group - collection of datasets including social networks

  • Action Science Explorer (Formerly iOpener Workbench) -

  • iOpener Project - The goal of iOPENER (Information Organization for PENning Expositions on Research) is to generate readily-consumable surveys of different scientific domains and topics, targeted to different audiences and levels, e.g., expert specialists, scientists from related disciplines, educators, students, government decision makers, and citizens including minorities and underrepresented groups. Surveyed material is presented in different modalities, e.g., an enumerated list of articles, a bulleted list of key facts, a textual summary, or a visual presentation with zoom and filter capabilities. The original contributions of this research are in the creation of an infrastructure for automatically summarizing entire areas of scientific endeavor by linking three available technologies: (1) bibliometric lexical link mining; (2) summarization techniques; and (3) visualization tools for displaying both structure and content.

  • I regularly hire women for 65% to 75% of what males make | Hacker News - Lots of tips on salary negotiation for both sexes in the comments thread

  • pjax - ajax with permalinks

  • Moog (2004) - IMDb See also Walter/Wendy Carlos…

Links for November 19th through November 25th

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My shared links for November 19th through November 25th:

Getting Bill Gates Wrong?

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John Gruber wrote a bit today ("Getting Steve Jobs Wrong"), about Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs was missing the central question of the man - how can we define what it was, exactly that he brought to the table?

Gruber's piece rings true and a bit sad, because we probably won't get the insight we were all hoping for. I certainly don't plan on reading Isaacson's book, after hearing all these disappointed nerds.

But because I'm a student of computing history (I took a class!), I had to pick a nit with Gruber's assertion that Gates invented the software company:

But the whole idea that software in general could be more valuable than hardware — or even just valuable, period? Gates. The man pioneered the concept of selling software.

This is probably true from the perspective of the personal computer and hobbyist industry, but the idea that software itself was valuable can be traced directly to 1969, when IBM made the decision to price software and services separately from hardware. It was a big enough deal that the decision earned itself a name: it was called "Unbundling".

That said, it leaves the question of what Gates brought to the table, too - he certainly seems like more than just a very effective businessman, but was he a visionary?

Links for October 25th through November 4th

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Links for September 27th through October 14th

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My shared links for September 27th through October 14th: