IraqJournal.org:
November 13th, 2002
IraqJournal.org: a small group
of independent
American journalists in Baghdad and the U.S.
dsandler.org
I am currently a software engineer at Google, where as a member of the Android platform team I build frameworks and user interfaces.
The blog here at dsandler.org is mostly historical; you can find more recent posts on Google+.
Archive for November 13th, 2002
Whedonesque has the scoop on the singer who opened last night’s Buffy episode.
November 13th, 2002
Whedonesque has the scoop on the singer
who opened last night’s
Buffy episode.
I’ve been reading Knuth’s 1974 Turing Award speech for a while now.
November 13th, 2002
I’ve been reading Knuth’s
1974 Turing Award speech for a while now. It’s full of gems:
The real problem is that programmers have spent far too much time
worrying about efficiency in the wrong places and at the wrong times;
premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it)
in programming.
[…] we should continually be striving to transform every art into a
science: in the process, we advance the art.
My feeling is that when we prepare a program, it
can be like composing poetry or music; as Andrei
Ershov has said [9], programming can give us both
intellectual and emotional satisfaction, because it is a
real achievement to master complexity and to establish
a system of consistent rules.Furthermore when we read other people’s programs,
we can recognize some of them as genuine works of
art.
[…] I want to address my closing remarks to the system programmers
and the machine designers who produce the systems that the rest of us
must work with. Please, give us tools that are a pleasure to use,
especially for our routine assignments, instead of providing some- thing
we have to fight with. Please, give us tools that encourage us to write
better programs, by enhancing our pleasure when we do so.
Sorry about the downtime this morning.
November 13th, 2002
Sorry about the downtime this morning. (I haven’t heard what happened,
exactly, but the machine seems not to have gone down at all … perhaps
a routing glitch?)
I know I said I wouldn’t keep track of
these for you, so let me just say that there are some new tracks on the
musical timeshares page.