Category: Programming

A mention of Squeak in a comment on my last post reminded me of Newsqueak, an interesting little language by Rob Pike. Newsqueak has nothing to do with Squeak. Newsqueak implements Hoare’s idea of Communicating Sequential Processes. The interesting part of Newsqueak is the channel data type. A channel is a two-way communication path. Given…

When I was in school I wrote programs in Scheme and its variant T. I still remember that as the easiest programming language I’ve ever used. In Scheme you never waste time on pointless boilerplate. You just write code. In order to run some function on a bunch of data, a very common operation, you…

Garbage collection is the traditional solution to the problem of managing memory. Multithreaded programming is the current wave of the future. I’ve written about the difficulties of multithreaded programming before, but people are going to do it regardless. In which case: how do we garbage collection in a multithreaded program? Let’s assume that we don’t…

Many programs today are written at a very high level. They are run in an interpreted environment, not a compiler. Often many different components running in different interpreted environments are hooked together. HTML and XML, for example, started out as markup languages, but now they are often also used as components of programs hooking together…

Peer review can be a useful technique when programming. It ensures that at least one other person has read the code. It can catch dumb bugs and help ensure that the code is not unnecessarily obscure. Several popular programming methodologies use it. (Pair programming has the same benefits.) Peer review has one obvious disadvantage: it…