In the mid- to late-60s, Jacques Tati produced and directed a kind of slapstick comedy about modern architecture, "Playtime." It was a commercial bomb, and bankrupted his family, but it's truly a great film. After seeing it a few times, it dawned on me that the office where I work -- which is all metal and glitter and glass -- could have been a set for the film. Compare Tati's set to mine.
I got some cables and things today so I could start recording music in beginner's style, sitting at my kitchen table playing things into my laptop. The first song I wrote, probably two years ago, is "Lonesome Prairie Dog," a kind of cowboy song with some irregular meter, so far as I remember. It's the only thing I've written that I've bothered to name.
You can't upload MP3s to blogger, so I made a video of this using a recent photo. There's not a hidden musical gem at the end; GarageBand just padded the last forty-five seconds with silence. I've found that I've had to click the play button a few times to get it working, too, so don't give up.
I hope you like it.
The ball keeps rolling. Microsoft has has F#, a functional language for the Common Language Runtime (CLR, the .NET virtual machine) for a while. Then there's LINQ, the functionally-inspired generic data query mechanism built into C# 3.0. Now Microsoft is involved with Haskell, one of the better-known purely functional languages of recent vintage.
One reason for the increasing interest in and support of functional programming languages is that they have some characteristics that are very beneficial when attempting to scale to a large number of cores. In particular, since all data is immutable, there are no locks. Also, unlike imperative languages (which includes Java, despite its object-orientedness), programs written in functional languages say what to do, not how to do it, which gives the compiler and runtime system freedom to, say, run parts of a loop on different cores. Anders Hejlsberg, one of the designers of C#, talks about that aspect of functional languages here (starting around 20:45).
For applications that need to run efficiently on many cores, the general migration path I see is from using threads explicitly, to using tasks (e.g. Java's Executor framework, where the application doesn't explicity create threads itself), to writing in a concurrency-oriented fashion, whether in a purely functional language using some hybrid approach. For the hybrid approach, here's a write up of some ways to do concurrency-oriented programming in Java.
(This post is based on an email I sent to my group at work. It's a Java shop.)
For such a crisp thinker as Willem Buiter, these words, with which I agree, are extremely harsh:
Governance lies as the heart of the mess. It was broken before the house of cards collapsed, and it's broken now, too, because the people responsible for the status quo are either still in power, or not on trial, or both.Too many bank insiders have exploited their monopoly of information and the control it bestows on them, to enrich themselves by robbing their shareholders blind. There has been a spectacular failure of corporate governance. Boards have foresaken their fiduciary duties. Surely, even the liability insurance taken out by board members ought not to shelter those who are guilty of, at best, such willfull negligence and dereliction of duty? Where are the class actions suits by disgruntled shareholders? Where are the board members in handcuffs?
Now that there is no meat left on the shareholder drumstick, the rogue managers and employees are going after a piece of the really juicy bird - the ever-patient tax payer. I hope they choke on it.
Your boss wants to know where the reports that you were supposed to have on his desk are? Be honest with him: "I don't have them." But, instead of full disclosure, leave a little to the imagination: "And I'm not sure why." If he presses, be nice but firm: "I don't feel comfortable giving them to you yet, but I'm flattered that you're looking for them." "Who is this wild creature who doesn't have the reports?" he'll be wondering. Sure, it will feel uncomfortable for you at first, but, trust us, it'll drive him crazy. He'll probably have to contact you every hour. You won't be able to get rid of him!
A lot of research is computer science is sort of boilerplate. Like when a graduate student incrementally improves a known solution to a given problem in an established area of research. Even when it's hard, that's the easy stuff, it seems. The hard stuff involves creating a new area of research altogether. That's what Peter J. Nürnberg is up to with his idea of "structural computing." So far, a couple of pages into a couple of his papers, and really not being familiar with the hypermedia corpus, the first thing that comes to mind is a data structure in which every element is connected to every other element by way of common data structures -- e.g. array, list, hash table -- so as to enable on-the-fly views of the data to be created. And this suggests the need to transform one view into another view arbitrarily, which in turn reminds me of category theory, data provenance, and the stuff that Benjamin Pierce has been working on, but not necessarily in that order and not to imply a relationship among those things that doesn't exist.
