Category Archives: Programming

An Application Of Bloom Filters At Google

Posted on 2025-04-12 by jcs

Joe Marshall, who is an old time Lisper now working at Google, has an interesting story about the use of Bloom filters at Google. The story begins when Marshall noticed an anomaly in the response time graph of one their … Continue reading →

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Twenty Years Of Git

Posted on 2025-04-09 by jcs

Wait. What? Git is 20 years old? How can that be? I’m sure it was just yesterday that Linus announced the Git project after his arrangement with Larry McVoy’s BitKeeper imploded. That’s a sad story in itself but this post … Continue reading →

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Useful Latency Number For Programmers

Posted on 2025-03-25 by jcs

If you’ve been around Irreal for a while, you know that I like to read about the latency of various computer operations. I find it fascinating but one could say that the data is abstract and dismiss it as “interesting … Continue reading →

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🥩 Red Meat Friday: Is C Useful For Understanding How Computers Work

Posted on 2024-07-12 by jcs

This post didn’t start as a Red Meat Friday item but as I worked on it, I got so exercised I decided it really should be one. For me, the question of whether C helps with understanding how computers work … Continue reading →

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Gotos Considered Maybe Not Harmful

Posted on 2024-07-01 by jcs

Way back in 1968, Edgar Dijkstra published a famous letter to the Communications of the ACM that explained why he felt the go to statement was being abused. Ever since then, lots of uninformed folks who haven’t bothered reading it … Continue reading →

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Debugging With Print

Posted on 2023-05-21 by jcs

Álvaro Ramírez has a guilty secret: he sometimes debugs code by inserting print statements into it. I was really happy to see his post because it’s a guilty secret that we share. Debuggers and similar tools are great and really … Continue reading →

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Generating Documents Directly From Elisp

Posted on 2023-05-12 by jcs

I’ve had this in my blog queue since April but it’s too good to let it fall into the bit bucket. Álvaro Ramírez has a problem with his chatgpt-shell package. He has some documentation in the form of tables, which … Continue reading →

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Checking A Word List

Posted on 2022-12-31 by jcs

Daniel Lemire has a post that poses an interesting challenge. Suppose you have a list of words—Lemire uses “ftp”, “file”, “http”, “https”, “ws”, “wss”—and want to check if some other word is in the list. Unless you believe in Zawinski’s … Continue reading →

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IDEs

Posted on 2022-12-13 by jcs

Renato Athaydes has an interesting post about his use of IDEs and how they are resource hogs and have a hard time operating on any but the most high powered machines. Most of you know by now that I’m not … Continue reading →

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Use Closed/Open Intervals For Programming

Posted on 2022-11-28 by jcs

In Mathematics, especially Real Analysis and Topology, the use of open and closed intervals is endemic. The open interval \((a,b)\) is the interval \(a < x < b\) while the closed interval \([a,b]\) includes the endpoints: \(a \le x \le … Continue reading →

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