The Programmer's Paradox

It would be nice if all of the programmers in this world always produced high-quality bug-free software. But they don’t.There are some isolated centers of excellence that get pretty close.But the industry's desire to produce high quality has been w...

Often I use the term expressibility to mean the width of all possible permutations within some usage of a formal system. So state machines and programming languages have different expressibility. The limits of what you can do with them are different.

What I think management theorists keep forgetting is that the rubber needs to hit the road. That is, management is a secondary occupation. It exists to make sure something actually gets done well enough, underneath. Time is the critical component. Th...

I was interested in neural nets over thirty years ago. A friend of mine was engrossed in them and taught me a lot. They were hot for a while, but then they faded away.As the AI winter began thawing, I dipped in periodically to see how it was progress...

For some technologies I have used, there is a philosophy that holds all of its functionality together. It is mostly consistent. It fits a pattern, it feels connected.Its existence means that if you need to do something, and you understand at least pa...

For most complicated things in our world, there is an inside and an outside.It’s a repeating pattern. If there is some clump of complexity, most often not all of that complexity is fully transparent. It is only visible locally. You have to be in th...

If there are two people who may edit the same data concurrently, as explained to me when I first started working, there is a serious problem. Someone way back then called it the dirty write problem.Bob opens up the data and starts to edit. But then h...