3 posts tagged “code monkeys”

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I'll Take Quizzes That Are Too Damned Easy For €200.

Apr 10, 2008
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Not only that, but there are only two in the list that I have ever used in real life.

Yeah yeah... I should post more often. I've been busy with work. I am the Jack Freakin' Parsons at work these days.

Your Friends, The Actor Model and The π-Calculus

Feb 4, 2008
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Just a brief note to go on the record. I note that the widespread deployment of pseudo-symmetric multiprocessing hardware in personal computers is giving software developers new reasons to put more energy into crawling up the concurrent programming learning curve. Sadly, it seems that a lot of the sooper-hip cool kids are glomming onto the latest craze in the world of haute couture for coders, i.e. The Actor Model.

I've been around this block. A lot. Kids, there is a reason we call them Computer Scientists. They actually do Science, not that buzzphrase-laden eXtreme Agility Kode-Monkee-Fu On Rails you're all excited about. Want to know how you can tell the difference? When they find a model that works better than their old one, they throw out the old one and use the new one. Then— and this is important— they publish their results, and remember not to use the old model when the new one is better.

Science. It works, bitches.

The "actor model" sounds new, right? Sorry. No, it's already outdated. What you want is a model more like The π-Calculus. Trust me on this one. Sure, it might mean having to learn a programming language that can be compiled into machine instruction code, but those are the little prices we have to pay to stay current with the literature. Deal.

Resource Leaks

Nov 17, 2007
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I just read an amusing story (linked at Slashdot) about how some nice code monkeys at Princeton.Edu lost the DARPA challenge because they expected too much from their garbage collector. Remember kids, it's not garbage if it's still subscribed to an event source in your dispatching loop.

(My snarky response: you need a profiler to discover this bug?)