Reading List and Rewiring

I am in the middle of rethinking my personal research and to that end debating about how much of my current reading list I should stick to. Here is what I have planned for the next couple of months:

Filed under: Books, Computer Science, DEK, Google, Mathematics, Rants

Haskell ?

I have been looking at various options for learning a new secondary programming language (Primary still being “C”) in the past few weeks. The main intent is having a lot fun, exploring new concepts and maybe switch to it in the very distant future. Python was a LOT of fun, powerful, partly gives me a day job and so on, but I haven’t been able to do anything profoundly new with it in the last few months. I have looked at Erlang, Haskell and Scala so far (Functional Programming and Concurrency were big motivators).

Filed under: Computer Science, Programming

You thought Skynet was Fiction ?

It might not be a theory of consciousness involving microtubules and pink butterflies – But I recently chanced upon Godel Machines which might very well be a way to make your own version of Skynet at home.

Filed under: Computer Science

ASMs and Random Things

Yuri Gurevich from Microsoft Research [1] gave a very erudite and somewhat interesting Google Tech Talk on the Church-Turing thesis today. The reward for patiently listening to a poor video quality H.323 session across the Atlantic at midnight was the discovery of something totally new: Abstract State Machines.

Update (The Video is Up):

Filed under: Computer Science, DEK, Humor

Pony Fail

Read this on Jonathan’s blog: http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/will_java_be_the_world

Its a great idea, no doubt. Just 11 years too late for Windows 98 – Long after people abandoned writing lousy desktop applications with ugly AWT or less ugly Swing. This time around Sun has a new secret weapon: JavaFX. But why would developers abandon Flash, AIR, Silverlight, OpenLaszlo, XUL and jump to a new platform ?

Filed under: Rants, Sun