Category Archives: Programming

Comments on the Usefulness of Emacs for Scientists

Posted on 2020-05-01 by jcs

Over at the Emacs subredit, gmu_nu says he’s a graduate student in Physics and wonders about the usefulness of Emacs for scientists who aren’t in CS. The resulting comments are an interesting compendium of the ways that scientists make use … Continue reading →

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In Praise of C

Posted on 2020-01-02 by jcs

I’ve been lucky to spend almost my entire career working in C. These days, I do more Lisp but for many years, C put bread on the table. Like all earthly things, C is starting to suffer a decline in … Continue reading →

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Goto

Posted on 2019-03-17 by jcs

Everyone in our field knows about Dijkstra’s famous paper Go To Statement Considered Harmful but how many have actually read the paper or know what his arguments were? Mostly we use it as a template to generate memes of the … Continue reading →

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A History of the Development of C

Posted on 2019-03-12 by jcs

Someone posted a pointer to an old (1994) paper of Dennis Ritchie on the development of the C language. I haven’t read it in years and it was interesting to revisit it. The paper, along with several others describing aspects … Continue reading →

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Some Wisdom on Pipelines

Posted on 2019-03-03 by jcs

Over at his blog, Ted Dziuba has posted a valuable piece of wisdom that is easy to forget. The TL;DR on the wisdom is that many tasks for which we instinctively turn to heavy-weight, distributed tools are more easily and … Continue reading →

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Moving from C++ to C

Posted on 2019-01-10 by jcs

I’ve written before about not being a fan of C++. I know it’s an unpopular opinion but I think it’s a terrible language that removed most useful aspects of C while keeping C’s problems. Partly, I suppose, that’s because I’m … Continue reading →

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Emacs for R Programming

Posted on 2018-12-26 by jcs

Although I’ve played around with it a bit and even written a few blog posts about it, I’m not really an R user and barely rise to the dilettante level. andyptt21 over at The Scientific Shrimper is an R user … Continue reading →

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Implementing Strings

Posted on 2018-11-05 by jcs

Andreas Zwinkau has a very nice article on strings and how to implement them. If you’re a C programmer, your first reaction might be, “Meh. They’re an array of bytes. What’s to implement?” If you’re, say, a Python programmer, you … Continue reading →

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Advanced Hashing Techniques

Posted on 2018-10-16 by jcs

One of the first advanced programming techniques I learned back when I was beginning was the use of hashing for fast table lookup. The use of the adjective “advanced” probably looks strange to younger engineers who are used to languages … Continue reading →

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Python for Lisp Programmers

Posted on 2018-06-05 by jcs

Back in 2000, Peter Norvig was getting complaints that the code in his and Stuart Russell’s book, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach was in Lisp, that many of the students using the book didn’t know Lisp, and that they didn’t … Continue reading →

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