Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Where's my cheese

Imperative programming is pretty difficult.

The main problem is that once you've put something somewhere you expect to find it where you put it.

“Hej, who moved my cheese?” you're thinking.

If you put a chunk of cheeses in the fridge, its nice if you can find it where you put it.  You put things in places, and later you expect to find them where you put them.  What this boils down to in terms of programming languages is the notion of variables.

In imperative programming languages, variables are the names of places where you can put things.

If I say

     int x;

In C this means there is a place called x where I can put an integer.

     x = 7;

means put the integer 7 into the place called x. Having put my 7 into my x I'd really like it to stay there forever.

“Why forever?” I can hear you asking.

“Because all other alternatives are worse”

If I can change x later, then my program will be very difficult to understand, the value of x might change many times and I'll have to understand the complete history of the program in order to figure out with the value is.

Even worse, what happens in a concurrent world, suppose several parallel processes can change the value of x at any time - if this could happen things could get really difficult to understand.

Functional programming language don't have this problem. If you say x is 7 then it is 7 for ever and ever and ever and ever.

This is really nice.

Believe me.



What happened to my quotes?

How come Google and blogger.com can't get quote marks right?

In English we usefor a start quote mark andfor a ending quotes.

But all Google's editors insert a " quote when you type the quote symbol.

What ever happened to typography?

I recover my blog

I managed to get my blog back. Admittedly it's not the original format but at least I can view all the old content. The problem appears to be in the templates. I tried using one of Goggles "Dynamic Views" but these just made my blog unreadable.

 I have now reverted to one of the "Simple" Templates. I guess simple means "I can now read my blog."


Thursday, June 21, 2012

Sorry about the blog

This blog is now totally fucked up. If you click on any of the old articles all you'll see is the beginning.
All comments seem to be broken as well.

I changed to the new templates.

Result - a mess.

Can I revert to the old blog - No. There is no revert button.

Thanks Google.

To my readers. Sorry about this. I'll try and fix the content on a non-google site.