A short post I wrote over at the SoundSoftware site. Spoiler: The answer I gave was not "Mercurial can be understood by human beings". Let me know if you spot any mistakes (or just want to flame, of course). A colleague pointed out that a big problem I didn't help with at all is how… Continue reading “What’s the difference between Mercurial and git?”
Compiling a program is a strange thing to do
Following my previous post about functional languages, a suspicious reader asked about the list of prerequisites I gave for a language: purely functional, Hindley-Milner typing, compiling to JVM bytecode, blah blah blah. Was that list genuine—or was I by any chance just listing the properties of a language I'd stumbled over at random and decided… Continue reading Compiling a program is a strange thing to do
Functional programming and the joy of learning something again
Twenty years ago, as a maths-and-computing undergraduate at the university of Bath, I was introduced to functional programming using the ML language by the excellent Julian Padget. We undergrads were set the traditional assignment of writing a sed-like text processor in ML, and found it first baffling and then, if we were lucky, rather exciting.… Continue reading Functional programming and the joy of learning something again
What laptop, tablet, or smartphone to buy? It’s a complicated business
My Dad asked me recently what sort of computer he should buy to replace his ten-year-old HP laptop. And what sort of phone should he get to replace his old Nokia? And while I was at it, should he get one of those tablet things? There are a lot of possible options at the moment,… Continue reading What laptop, tablet, or smartphone to buy? It’s a complicated business
Linux
I write plenty of tedious posts about computers and technology, and I usually tag them according to what they're about. As I write this, the tag cloud for this blog looks like the picture on the left—Apple and Microsoft loom large, Nokia and Oracle get a look in, and there's no reference to Linux at… Continue reading Linux
Windows Phone: a bit like BeOS
Today's possibly stretching-a-point Technology Analogy In a previous article I compared the situation of Windows 8 on the desktop to that of OS/2 in the late 80s. Windows Phone 8 is in a different position. While Windows 8 gets its awkwardness from the need to provide compatibility with the dominant platform—which in this case means… Continue reading Windows Phone: a bit like BeOS
The Breakfast Post 