I’ve just discovered my old employer, LShift, have a blog. Lots of good stuff there. As usual, TonyG is producing code like the mad hacking machine he is. Now I just have to get him to put some of it in Planet.
Archive for October, 2005
Blog Watch: LShift Blog
Monday, October 31st, 2005Not-so-failsafe Computing
Friday, October 28th, 2005I went to withdraw some money from an ATM yesterday, but instead of the normal screen I was confronted by a Window NT 4.0 bootup screen. The machine seemed to have hung at that point, so for a laugh I pressed 4-5-6, thinking it was the closest key sequence to the famous Ctrl-Alt-Del. Imagine my surprise when the machine rebooted! It can tell you the ATM was a Pentium 3 running at 700MHz, with 128MB of RAM. This whole episode amazes me for so many reasons: that ATMs run Windows (do they ever get viruses? can I play Minesweeper if the network is slow?), that the software doesn’t detect crashes and try to recover, and that they can be rebooted so simply. I’ll never look at an ATM the same way again!
O’Caml Making In-roads in Finance
Thursday, October 27th, 2005Very encouraging to see this advertisement. The highlights:
Jane Street Capital (http://janestcapital.com) is a proprietary
trading company located in Manhattan. We’re looking for students
interested in internships for the summer of 2006…One unusual attraction of the job is that the large majority
of our programming is done in OCaml.
It’s great to see industry adopting advanced programming languages. Finance is not an entirely new domain for functional programming. Simon Peyton-Jones wrote a paper some time ago on a combinator library for financial contracts. This work has been commercialised, with the implementation again using O’Caml. In fact there is large literature of domain specific languages for financial applications (for example Risla) so there is certainly a market for applying programming language theory in this area.
SISCWeb Petstore
Thursday, October 27th, 2005Ben Simon implements the Java Petstore in Scheme using the excellent SISCWeb framework, which runs in the equally excellent SISC Scheme implementation. Well worth a look, particularly the writeup which explains some of the advantages Scheme brings to web development.
Neologism of the week
Monday, October 24th, 2005From Shriram Krishnamurthi comes a nice phrase to describe the AJAX applications that are emerging: webtop. It captures succinctly the blend between web and desktop that characterises these applications, and points to a future when the distinction is meaningless. It’s early days for the webtop right now: most time is spent just getting the interface to work. My bet for next stop on the road is disconnected functionality. While SF may be always online sometime soon, but it will be a long time before that applies to everyone.