Dec 1, 2007
The important parts of core git are things like writing your own object allocator to make the footprint as small as possible to be able to efficiently track object flags for a million objects. It’s writing a parser for the tree objects that is fairly optimal, because there is no abstraction. One of the great strengths of C is that it doesn’t make you think of your program as anything high-level.

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Nov 30, 2007
A lot of the dissatisfaction with computer science comes from the misplaced expectation that a computer science graduate will be a good programmer. Computer science and software engineering are very different disciplines. Software engineering teaches the process of developing software, in terms of both tools and processes. A computer science course only briefly touches on these topics, in the same way that a materials physicist may learn something of mechanical engineering.
David Chisnell focuses on the education of Mort. Perhaps teaching software engineering requires something more agile than traditional classrooms. via

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Nov 30, 2007
It’s time to quit pandering to Mort with our condescending paternalistic attitude, and instead demand better from him.

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Nov 30, 2007
Test-driven development is akin to double-entry accounting.

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Nov 26, 2007
Hacker News is now perhaps my favorite social network, even though it doesn’t look anything like one, and it doesn’t include most of my best friends in the real world. I think there’s a lesson here.
me

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Nov 26, 2007
The 2008 US Presidential race will be a $1-billion election. To be taken seriously, a candidate will need to raise at least $100 million by the end of 2007.
Michael Toner, FEC Chairman

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Nov 24, 2007
While big dollar-holding countries such as China, Singapore, Russia and the Persian Gulf states are very worried about the erosion in value of their dollar-denominated holdings, they also know that an abrupt move to cut their pegs to the dollar would force a run on the currency, leaving them even poorer. Instead these countries are pursuing careful reallocations of their investment holdings that will allow them to hedge against the dollar’s decline.

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Nov 23, 2007
Whereas with other languages splitting your code into neat composable blocks is considered good practice, in Factor you simply don’t have any choice: you can’t just keep parking state on the stack. Anything exceeding 3 variables and a single line of code and the cognitive load starts to ramp up exponentially. This may make Factor the ultimate teaching language. In other languages the novice programmer can write a lot of procedural code using just functional decomposition before feeling the pressure to look for other abstractions. With Factor that pressure is there almost from the start, and the novice is constantly forced to scan the big picture of abstraction possibilities.

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Nov 21, 2007
Since a program’s output can be considered a side-effect, the only thing you can use pure functional programming for is warming-up your server.
— Anonymous. Hat tip: Denis Papathanasiou

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Nov 18, 2007
MVC is an elegant design pattern, but an MVC framework must provide a simple way for components to include other components.

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