How is code born? What do good developers look for when they write their code? The development of a system can be measured by its trade-offs. Some systems cannot be slow, some others cannot fail, some others cannot be too expensive. All systems want to have everything, obviously. But they cannot, obviously. Before we study […]
programming
Processors, Part Three: the Future. New models.
If one big complex thread being executed too fast is risky as we saw, because there’s a physical limit to sheer clock speed and cheating optimisations are unsafe, then, we all know the other option: what about doing many simple and small things independently? To put it differently: if we cannot make the clock any […]
Processors, Part Two: the Present. Meltdown and Spectre
Imagine a restaurant. A professional chef, in charge of the best pizzas in town, and nobody knows how’re they done. It’s such a secret, those magic ingredients. And imagine a bunch of apprentices, supposed to help him. Imagine them following the chef’s orders. And then see, the chef going to the fridge to take some […]
On so called low-level and performant languages
Last time, we dug into a new debate: are languages really decoupled from the hardware that runs them? Are the semantics of a language modelling mainstream hardware, and should they? Can we escape to new models of hardware, and new models of semantics? We saw that Backus made a good point arguing that languages have […]
The Von Neumann Architecture, a friend and a foe
Von Neumann, another star from Göttingen, gave the next important step in computation after Turing (checkout my previous post for Turing’s first step), in a way that, to this day, you can’t talk about computers without talking about Von Neumann. Which came first: the Hardware, or the Software and Languages? In an analogous way to […]
How I befriended Alan Turing
While Leon has been learning about arts, and he as been writing about it, I caught up with a hobby of my own as well, but I have been silent about it. I befriended Alan Turing. And it’s time I talk about it. Let me keep it short so I can get to the point. Some […]