When IT Becomes a Profession

An intriguing article, suggesting that the current Computing Science must evolve into a much broader discipline. Touches on a number of points, including principles vs. practices, ways in which computing must 'cross the chasm' (in the sense of Geoffrey Moore's book), why computing must focus on its customers, invention vs. innovation, and CS vs. IT. Thanks to Uday Reddy for recommending it.

First Java, then Ajax, and now ... Flash?

Bruce Eckel argues that Flash is the new, new thing. He's particularly keen on Flex, which compiles Actionscript, a superset of ECMAscript, to run on Flash. I agree with him when he says "applications of any complexity using HTML, CSS and JavaScript are difficult and expensive to develop", and also agree that a big motivator for using Javascript or Flash is that there are far fewer installation problems than Java. Perhaps we should consider setting up Links to generate either Javascript or Flash. Thanks to Greg Morrisett for pointing me at the article.

O'Caml Summer Project at Jane St. Capital

Jane St. Capital, a financial firm, made a stir when they started to advertise for O'Caml programmers. Now they are running a summer project, loosely modelled on Google's Summer of Code, to spur development of O'Caml libraries and tools.

Decorators for Python metaprogramming

A cute idea to support code that manipulates code. A tip of the hat to Lambda the Ultimate for the pointer.

Definitional Interpreters for Higher-Order Programming Languages

I just became aware that this seminal paper by John Reynolds was republished by HOSC in 1998, making it available online. (Thanks, Olivier and Carolyn!) If you've never read it and you are interested in programming languages then I suggest you read it immediately. It introduced the term metacircular interpreter and the concept of defunctionalization, as well as being one of the first clear explanations of continuation passing style. The paper is accompanied by a new forward written by John, Definitional Interpreters Revisited.

The Essence of Functional Programming: the code

Oleg Paraschenko has typed in all the examples from The Essence of Functional Programming, and made them available online. There is also a review of the paper in Russian. Thanks, Oleg!

The h-index and m-index

Michael Schwartzbach has written a web application to compute the h-index and m-index of an author, using data from Google Scholar. The terms come from Hirsch 2005, which defines h-index as follows:

A scientist has index h if h of his/her N papers have
at least h citations each, and the other (N − h) papers
have no more than h citations each.

The m-index is given by h/n, where n is the number of years the scientist has been publishing papers. Jens Palsberg maintains a list of computer scientists with h-index of at least 40.

Elsevier and the Arms Trade

The BBC writes: "Medical journal The Lancet has launched a scathing attack on its owner, Reed Elsevier, for helping to organise Europe's largest arms fair."

Nick Gil maintains a page on the subject.

Dabble DB

Avi Bryant demoed this at the Dynamic Languages Symposium in Portland in October (attached to OOPSLA). I tried it out on some data I needed to manipulate (computing who has submitted lots of papers to various conferences but sat on few pcs). It worked well and was fun to use.

37 signals

A fun manual explaining how to design an app and run a web company. My favorite chapters so far are 'Make opinionated software' and 'Meetings are toxic'.