Simon Willison’s Weblog

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11 items tagged “computerscience”

2021

PostgreSQL: nbtree/README (via) The PostgreSQL source tree includes beatifully written README files for different parts of PostgreSQL. Here’s the README for their btree implementation—it continues to be actively maintained (last change was is March) and “git blame” shows that parts of the file date back 25 years, to 1996! # 25th June 2021, 6:09 pm

2017

An Early History of Pony. Pony is an interesting looking new programming language, built around actor-based concurrency on top of a mathematically proved type system. The history of the language makes for interesting reading: it’s based on experience with actor libraries in C at an investment bank, combined with research into type systems at Imperial College London. # 18th December 2017, 8:33 pm

For most books, the review is a bell-shaped curve of star ratings; this one has a peak at 1, a peak at 5, and very little in between. How could this be? I think it is because SICP is a very personal message that works only if the reader is at heart a computer scientist (or willing to become one).

Peter Norvig # 28th November 2017, 6:38 pm

2013

How is Web engineering related to Software engineering?

I’d describe it as a subset of software engineering that deals with issues relating to the web—web application development, web protocols, browsers and so on.

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How does a web page interact with a server to parse a dynamic JSON file?

If you’re only dealing with 60 records there’s no need to add a full database. I’ve actually hand coded a 50 record JSON file before and it was fine- use an editor with good JSON support (I like Sublime Text 2) and it’s pretty easy to hand write.

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What is the best place to post a call for papers in the computer science community?

Our service Lanyrd has a feature to help keep track of conference CFPs. We tend to have more commercial conferences than academic ones, but those topics are definitely relevant to our core audience. For example, our Cloud conferences and events page shows six upcoming CFPs at the moment.

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2011

Why do websites contain multiple webpages when they could use AJAX?

Because it shouldn’t require a full-blown JavaScript interpreter just to access content on the Web.

[... 32 words]

2010

List of important publications in computer science (via) Amazingly comprehensive list on Wikipedia. # 9th June 2010, 11:50 pm

2009

I propose that the World Wide Web would serve well as a framework for structuring much of the academic Computer Science curriculum. A study of the theory and practice of the Web’s technologies would traverse many key areas of our discipline.

Tim Bray # 16th July 2009, 10:16 am

2008

Animated Sorting Algorithms (via) JavaScript animations of various sorting algorithms, running against four different initial conditions (random, nearly ordered, reversed and few unique). I wish I’d had this during my computer science degree. # 21st October 2008, 12:17 am

2007

There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things

Phil Karlton # 5th July 2007, 12:46 am