There's a meme out there that Java is the new COBOL. The rationale is summarised nicely in the first couple of paragraphs of this Wiki page, before they ramble off into a rant about how Smalltalk should have taken over the world:Is Java the new Cobol? A good argument can be made that yes, it is. Considering the billions of lines of Cobol code that ( Read more... )

I went to an all-day sales pitch conference sponsored by Wolfram Research yesterday, all about just how damn cool the new version of Mathematica is. There's a lot to like: as a language, it seems to have a nice blend of Lisp-like and APL-like features, so you can do all your standard functional programming tricks and what looks like a decent subset ( Read more... )

No thesis today - I had a six hour job interview through in Edinburgh, for the maths consultancy people (who, it turns out, are university friends of my Canadian friend Jeff - small world!). The interview went reasonably well, though it could have been better - I was a bit stressed out by the whole interview situation and wasn't as sharp as I could ( Read more... )

totherme kindly drew my attention to this blog post today. The author, Slava Akhmechet, tries to explain away that horrible feeling of unproductivity and frustration that I know so well from my attempts to use Haskell: his claim is that it's just that my expectations are miscalibrated from using imperative languages. A Haskell solution to a given problem, ( Read more... )

An email from the people to whom I applied:( I missed the point entirely, it seems :-( )