* Posts by Jan van Oort

6 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Oct 2007

Reg lexicographical Shock Army liberates mobe

Jan van Oort
Go

!!!Lester !!!

However you may be looking, however foul-reeking your morning breath may be - I want your babies !!

Male pattern boldness

Jan van Oort
Go

Vague bridge

Like the Abstract Bridge pattern, Vague Bridge provides us with a loose and therefore replacable coupling of two implementation classes. The Vague Bridge pattern, however, gives us the additional guarantee that couplings and abstract references may be null-ed at any moment, resulting in joyfully non-deterministic behavior and in new bugs in software that was already tested and declared final.

Of opposable thumbs and software engineering

Jan van Oort
Pirate

Micro$oft research article ???

Having read the entire article by Simon Peyton Jones, I remain a bit baffled. This is definitely the first time I see a Microsoft guy breaking a lance for something even remotely as advanced and out-of-MS's-league as Haskell.

Being a Java programmer myself, I donot, however, consider that implementing your concurrent software in Haskell *really* yields higher-grade software, as

1) instead of fully analyzing your problem and modelling locks, transactions and threads etc., this article encourages you to rely upon the correctness of a Haskell implementation of transaction handling. People like e.g. DBA's can do that, they arenot primarily concerned with the innards of software but with using software to handle their data. Programmers cannot afford to do that, as they actually *create* such software

2) being able to fully analyze your problem and model it into locks, lock handling mechanims, transactions and threads etc. is a skill any good non-greenhorn programmer must have. He/she should *at least* be able to reason about such things. Relying upon a Haskell implementation blunts his/her sharpness.

3)Java provides you with all the necessary tools to satisfy both 1) and 2)

Bubbly billygoat-bursting boffinry brouhaha at MoD

Jan van Oort
Flame

No weighing-off required

As a former diver, having been obliged to stop because suffering from decompression-induced osteonecrosis, I can ascertain

1) that decompression can indeed cause severely painful afflictions

2) that no diver, or doctor treating divers, in their right minds could possibly advocate abolition of animal tests if said tests just *may* yield results that can be helpful in treating such afflictions

3) that, although I am of left-ish political pedigree, I donot have any problems with animals suffering this sort of treatments

I mean, I can live with osteonecrosis, yes... But ( physical ) life without it would be *more than a little bit* less annoying.

Preterite peter-out: How the end beginned

Jan van Oort
Go

Proposal for the regularization of the verb "to are"

I am - I ammed

you are - you ared

( thou art ) - thou arted

he/she is - he/she issed

we are - we ared

you are - you ared

they are - they ared

Jan van Oort
Alert

Half-life

Computing a "half-life" ranging into the thousands of years from a 1000-year set of data doesnot necessarily pertain to unsound scientific methods... The method used here was not observation of decay, but extrapolation and induction on a limited set of data. Just the same thing as was done to compute half-lives of decaying elements. Which last thing nobody surrounds with question marks, to my knowledge.