Mike Dunlavey

7,795 reputation

11635

bio	website	en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…
	location	United States
	age	68
visits	member for	2 years, 8 months
	seen	37 mins ago
stats	profile views	661

BS Mechanical Engr.
PhD CS(AI)
CS Prof (4yr)
Numerous consulting jobs.
15 yr at http://www.pharsight.com
Published book on CS & several articles
4 kids, 2 grand
Pilot(student)

	7,795 reputation	bio	website	en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…	visits	member for	2 years, 8 months
11635 badges		location	United States		seen	37 mins ago

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Oct 4	comment	Why is Lisp useful? ++ Makes sense, especially the last sentence.
Oct 4	comment	Why is Lisp useful? @Mark: Great movie.
Oct 3	comment	I am in a rather difficult work situation. Should I stay or should I go? Excellent question. Widely applicable.
Oct 3	comment	I am in a rather difficult work situation. Should I stay or should I go? ++ Very wise, especially the part about staying in the job while you look for another.
Oct 2	comment	I am in a rather difficult work situation. Should I stay or should I go? @Bob: I'm sure you're right. I haven't worked at any (well, maybe one - a lottery business). Some were just trying to start up something that sounded good so they could sell it in a few years and go buy a yacht.
Sep 27	comment	Is Java “dead in the water” as a consequence of Oracle buying Sun and subsequently suing Google @Dean J: Well, my examples are DAO, Fortran, and C/C++. We built a product, using a 3rd-party grid control, based on DAO, and the programmers move on. Whattayaknow - MS tries to rip it out from under us. Fortran (not that I like it): try to stick with one compiler - you can't, you gotta keep buying new ones, 'cause the old ones don't work with customers' new machines. Same for C and C++. But what if I don't WANNA do .net? What if I LIKE VC? Too ****ing bad, soldier.
Sep 27	comment	Is Java “dead in the water” as a consequence of Oracle buying Sun and subsequently suing Google @Dean J: That's good. I'm thinking of how IBM used to trap people with EBCDIC and special-format punch cards, while DEC had simple ASCII-stream IO, very simple, that didn't trap anybody. Then DEC got big, and they started trying to lock people in with fancy terminals with special codes. Then I think of Microsoft, and the series of compilers, databases, etc. they try to trap people into. If Sun & Oracle are resisting the temptation to corner a revenue stream, great. I'm sure they've got marketing staff asking "Why are we doing this?"
Sep 24	comment	Is writing a book, article, or presenting at conference worth it? @jblue: Like: So you're a pointy-head smart-a** liberal, huh? Or: You must be like all those other quacks who think they know better than everybody else. Or witness all the flak I got on this: stackoverflow.com/questions/266373/… . Or witness the total lack of references to the SIGPLAN article.
Sep 23	comment	How to Subtly Tell a Professor About our Poor Programming Assignments? That's a good idea. The only problem is, profs are loathe to criticize one another's teaching style, because they have to work with them, and it could boomerang.
Sep 23	comment	How do you dive into large code bases? +1 Yeah, that's what I do too, but I don't know of any way to make the job easy. In my experience, it can take weeks before I feel safe making any changes, and months before I'm "at home" in the code. It certainly helps if you can ask questions of the developers.
Sep 17	comment	When should I care about performance? ++ FALSE DICHOTOMY! Will they never learn? When you find and fix a performance problem, the code is not only quicker, it's better. I only regret that I have but one upvote to give!
May 30	comment	How to become a “faster” programmer? ++ If I could expand on the chair - you need to sit upright, have good lumbar support, have your keyboard / mouse down low, and your monitor up high so you are looking straight at it. The chair should support your forearms and not your elbows. Ideally it should give good ventilation to carry away perspiration.
Feb 4	comment	Why hasn't a faster, “better” language than C come out? @Pestilence: I've heard that, but I haven't seen it. I've seen plenty of C and Fortran, including lately. I haven't seen any case where the ASM that Fortran generates could not be equaled by C in the hands of a competent programmer. Maybe it exists, but I haven't seen it.
Jan 26	comment	Why hasn't a faster, “better” language than C come out? I think the idea that Fortran is faster than C is somewhat myth, depending on what's being coded and who's doing it. The reason heavyweight numeric libraries are in Fortran is not because Fortran is faster, but because the routines were originally coded in Fortran and few people have the nerve or need to re-write it. The small number of math-gurus who write and vet these algorithms are happy in Fortran and see no need to change, especially since they imagine Fortran is faster.
Sep 12	comment	How to become a “faster” programmer? ... and the idea that performance works against maintainability is also another common idea that many people believe, but isn't necessarily so. This field has a lot of those beliefs.
Sep 12	comment	How to become a “faster” programmer? ... I know it's counterintuitive, but that's my experience. The link I gave above is a pretty good small example of how by tuning a "pretty good" program you can make it both faster and smaller, and learn from the experience.
Sep 12	comment	How to become a “faster” programmer? @Jim: Certainly you want to avoid the premature optimization part, because that is another form of guessing. What I've found, though, is if you take a big program, and do performance tuning on it, you find out that what makes it slow is also what makes it big. That experience leads to designing things better in the future, so they are simpler, faster, and smaller. But without the tuning experience, you don't learn that lesson.
Sep 11	comment	How to become a “faster” programmer? ... and it's not only the time you spend writing the email, but the time it takes to get your head back into the code from where you left off. For me, that's the daunting part.
Apr 21	comment	When is it reasonable to create my own programming language? @Dog: From an AI viewpoint, that would be ideal. Take a look at differential execution. That's a real example of cutting the source code by an order of magnitude. Boilerplate may be necessary, but it's not a good thing.
Mar 25	comment	Have you dealt with space hardening? And, have all the failure responses thoroughly planned, on the conviction that they will be needed.