Thu 2007-10-25 I know I am probably a bit behind the times, but I have just come across these three favorable reviews of Daniel Jackson's Software Abstractions: Logic, Language, and Analysis
It is nice when you find out that other people agree with you about something.
Sat 2007-08-25 While I am on the subject of Luca Cardelli I should point out the slides to his autobiographical talk An Accidental Simula User which provide an excellent background on the motivations and significance of his work. I cannot resist quoting one sentence:
Java allowed me to move from one type safe language (Modula-3) to another, narrowly avoiding the entire age of C++!
Lucky man!
You might notice that Cardelli ignores the common advice about not putting too much information on overhead projector slides. However, I think it is better to regard his slides as a colourful magazine-style article meant to be read on-screen and, as this, they are rather good. (You might also note that Cardelli's web-site would never win any awards for web-site design but, after all, it's the content that matters.)
Mon 2007-07-23 A nice quote by 'monochrom' from Haskell Weekly News:
Fear leads to uncertainty. Uncertainty leads to doubt. Doubt leads to theorem proving.
Alas, I suspect that, for most people, blind panic comes before theorem proving.
Fri 2007-05-18 From a recent interview that Leslie Lamport gave to Mihai Bidiu:
The idea of doing something before coding is not so radical. Any number of methods, employing varying degrees of formalism, have been advocated. Many of them involve drawing pictures. The implicit message underlying them is that these methods save you from the difficult task of thinking. If you just use the right language or draw the right kind of pictures, everything will become easy. The best of these methods trick you into thinking. They offer some incentive in the way of tools or screen-flash that sugar coats the bitter pill of having to think about what you’re doing. The worst give you a happy sense of accomplishment and leave you with no more understanding of what your program is supposed to do than you started with. The more a method depends on pictures, the more likely it is to fall in the latter class.
I find that the worst methods confuse me so much with irrelevant details that I give up before I get to the happy sense of accomplishment. But then I am probably more easily confused than Leslie Lamport.
Fri 2007-02-23 From an interview by Bill Venners on Artima Developer in 2002:
To me, object design is a design of contracts. Contracts define what you are allowed to rely on. Contracts are not expressible in anything less than a human language. You need to have someone sit down and say, if this is true then that happens. You have to spell out all the details.
