What Is Code?

Paul Ford has written an absolute epic, called What Is Code?

Lots and lots of good stuff in it.

Java was supposed to supplant C and run on smart jewelry. Now it runs application servers, hosts Lisplike languages, and is the core language of the Android operating system. It runs on billions of things. It won. C and C++, which it was designed to supplant, also won. A lot of things keep winning because computers keep getting more plentiful. It’s weird.

Also:

Compilation is one of the denser subjects in computer science, because the lower down you go, the more opportunities there are to do deep, weird things that can speed up code significantly—and faster is cheaper and better. You can write elegant, high-level code like F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the computer will compile you into Ernest Hemingway. But compilers often do several passes, turning code into simpler code, then simpler code still, from Fitzgerald, to Hemingway, to Stephen King, to Stephenie Meyer, all the way down to Dan Brown, each phase getting less readable and more repetitive as you go.

A great read. Takes a long time though. 30,000 words!

Alberta Election 2015

As the polls started to roll in last night, I went from hopeful to excited, excited to disbelief, and disbelief to wonderment. 

After a week of talking with friends about how it was so unlikely for an  NDP majority, and accustoming myself to the idea that it would be an NDP official opposition, seeing them take government was an incredible ride. 

Alberta is going to be a place to watch. Interesting times to be sure. 

A good start to a day off

Coffee and "The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage" 

Important Logic

When you find important logic locked up in a regex:

Sunrise

This morning, I got up with the sun. I really missed this over the winter — there's something lovely about having the sun pouring into your bedroom as you wake up. 

We'll see how I feel about it when the sun is getting up an hour or more before I want to 😁.

Rouge Park

Good Friday was the warmest day in recent memory. It was fortunate then that we had chosen to go on a little adventure that day, an adventure to Rouge Park. 

It was lots of fun, here's a few pictures. 

Reproducibility in CS, Updated

Just about a year ago I linked to a study out of the University of Arizona on reproducibility in CS. I had some complaints, and later linked to a crowd-sourced effort to check the results.

It appears that the authors of this study paid some attention to the criticism, and reexamined their study. It's worth looking at the updated technical report and results, which are located at the original project homepage.

The worst search result page

Whelp. I may have found the worst search result on the internet. 

There is so much wrong here. 

Alright. Let's break this down. 

1. I searched for 'seedling'. The page responds: "No results for 'seedling'. Displaying 13 results for 'seedling'". WAT. 
2. The results are all lamps. 
3. Except for Miracle-Gro. So there's that. 
4. There are only 12 results displayed. 

They also think I'm in Vancouver. Which is about as wrong as they can be. Except, when I try to change it, it says "null" in the top left, and then thinks I searched for an empty string. 

edit: Now that I've calmed down a bit, it turns out that 13 results is actually accurate: There's also the "Know how" tab that I missed. So 13 results, 12 products, 1 pieces of 'know how'.