Towards the end of 2014, in need of pleasant distraction, I began writing, in Go, my second pseudo-APL, called Ivy. Over the years, Ivy's capabilities expanded to the point that it's now being used to do things such as to design floating-point printing algorithms . That was unexpected, doubly so because among the set of array languages founded by APL, Ivy remains one of the weakest. Also…
On Bloat On Bloat The link below holds the slides from a talk I gave last year for the Commonwealth Bank of Australia's annual tech conference. They are mostly self-explanatory, with the possible exception of the "attractive nuisance" slide, for which I explained how a small package with good intentions can accumulate both a large set of dependents and a large set of dependencies, turning it into…
This is my closing talk ( video ) from the GopherConAU conference in Sydney, given November 10, 2023, the 14th anniversary of Go being launched as an open source project. The text is interspersed with the slides used in the presentation. What We Got Right, What We Got Wrong INTRODUCTION Hello. Let me start by thanking Katie and Chewy for the giving me the honor of presenting the closing talk for…
In May 2009, Google hosted an internal "Design Wizardry" panel, with talks by Jeff Dean, Mike Burrows, Paul Haahr, Alfred Spector, Bill Coughran, and myself. Here is a lightly edited transcript of my talk. Some of the details have aged out, but the themes live on, now perhaps more than ever. --- Simplicity is better than complexity. Simpler things are easier to understand, easier to build, easier…
I studied physics in university, and at one point asked a professor if I should learn German, because it seemed all the key texts of early 20th century physics were written by German-speaking physicists in German journals such as Annalen der Physik . But my prof assured me that was not needed, insisting that my own native language would serve me well. And he knew German, so his advice seemed…
Color blindness is an inaccurate term. Most color-blind people can see color, they just don't see the same colors as everyone else. There have been a number of articles written about how to improve graphs, charts, and other visual aids on computers to better serve color-blind people. That is a worthwhile endeavor, and the people writing them mean well, but I suspect very few of them are…
(Another resurrected post from the my old Google+ stream, which appeared on or about Dec 6, 2011.) For unknown reasons, someone asked me if had a copy of this file today. I didn't, but I remembered it was in dmr's home directory, and asked a friend there to find it. I remembered correctly. I don't know why it was touched in 1993, but the .v (mips object file) was created in late 1992. I leave the…
(Another resurrected post from the my old Google+ stream, which appeared on or about Sep 4, 2012. Thirty years of age isn't too far off now.) UTF-8 turned 20 years old yesterday. It's been well documented elsewhere ( http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/utf-8-history.txt ) that one Wednesday night, after a phone call from X/Open, Ken Thompson and I were sitting in a New Jersey diner talking about…
(Here's the next resurrected post, this time from Jun 8, April 30, 2012.) A while back I posted the questions from the 1984 Unix/mpx Exit quiz: https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2020/01/unix-quiz.html Here they are again, with annotated answers. The answers are in the form of the simplified pattern that the mpx exit program used to verify them. Note: I have never seen a correct set of answers…
(Here's another resurrected post from April 30, 2012. Answers in a followup.) People objected that there was no Exit item on the main menu for the mpx program that put windows on the Blit; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blit_(computer_terminal) (which mistakenly says it implemented cursor addressing when turned on - as if!) and http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/doc/83/mpx.ps.gz . It seemed…
A while back, Google Plus (google+?) lost its public face, removing from public view too much material. But Google, for all its faults, also has virtues, and it let me capture all my posts using its "takeout" feature before plus went negative. I'm going to publish a few of the more worthwhile or at least fun ones here over the next little while. To get things going, here's a link I posted from…
There has been recent discussion about the reproducibility of scientific results, with some unflattering conclusions. One study suggests only a 62% reproducibility rate. For some fields it's probably much worse. Any result that depends on computation is at great risk of continual change in its programming environment. A program written ten years ago has little chance of building today without…
Someone at work asked about this trip report I wrote long ago. I had not realized it was ever seen outside Bell Labs Research, but I now know it was. It's a bit of a time capsule now, and I was able resurrect it. Importing into Blogger was a bit of an ordeal that informs some of the points raised here, but other than that I make no comment on the contents beyond apologizing for the tone. This…
A recent dig through some old papers uncovered this CERN memo from 1973 describing controls for the Proton Synchrotron being built at the time. I visited the control room some years later and saw the controls in action, installed on a room-hugging curved console reminiscent of a NASA mission control room. I was so impressed by the devices I asked for a copy of the documentation, written by (one…
The Upspin project uses a custom package, upspin.io/errors , to represent error conditions that arise inside the system. These errors satisfy the standard Go error interface, but are implemented using a custom type, upspin.io/errors.Error , that has properties that have proven valuable to the project. Here we will demonstrate how the package works and how it is used. The story holds lessons for…
Here follows the original "manifesto" from late 2014 proposing the idea for what became Upspin . The text has been lightly edited to remove a couple of references to Google-internal systems, with no loss of meaning. I'd like to thank Eduardo Pinheiro, Eric Grosse, Dave Presotto and Andrew Gerrand for helping me turn this into a working system, in retrospect remarkably close to the original vision.…
Drawing Copyright ©2017 Renee French This week marks the 10th anniversary of the creation of Go. The initial discussion was on the afternoon of Thursday, the 20th of September, 2007. That led to an organized meeting between Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson at 2PM the next day in the conference room called Yaounde in Building 43 on Google's Mountain View campus. The name for the…
I spent a few days a while back in a board meeting for a national astronomy organization and noticed a property of the population in that room: Out of about 40 people, about a third were women. And these were powerful women, too: professors, observatory directors and the like. Nor were they wallflowers. Their contributions to the meeting exceeded their proportion. In my long career, I had never…
Two long-buried caches of photographs came to light last year. One was a stack of cellulose nitrate negatives made on the Scott Antarctic expedition almost a hundred years ago. Over time, they became stuck together into a moldy brick, but it was possible to tease the negatives apart and see what they revealed. You can view the images at the web site of the New Zealand Antarctic Heritage Trust .…
I've been trying on and off to find a nice way to deal with setting options in a Go package I am writing. Options on a type, that is. The package is intricate and there will probably end up being dozens of options. There are many ways to do this kind of thing, but I wanted one that felt nice to use, didn't require too much API (or at least not too much for the user to absorb), and could grow as…
The other day I was talking with a friend (yes, I have friends) about the way communication of ideas has changed. The Internet is the obvious advance, but what used to happen when an important new idea needed to be disseminated? As an example of how things used to be, I told him the story of Bohr's famous train trip. In 1925, two students at the University of Leiden, Sem Goudsmit and George…
Some days, things just don't work out. Or don't work. Earlier I wanted to upgrade (their term, not mine) my iMac from Snow Leopard (10.6) to Lion (10.7). I even had the little USB stick version of the installer, to make it easy. But after spending some time attempting the installation, the Lion installer "app" failed, complaining about SMART errors on the disk. Disk Utility indeed reported there…
Here is the text of the talk I gave at the Go SF meeting in June, 2012. This is a personal talk. I do not speak for anyone else on the Go team here, although I want to acknowledge right up front that the team is what made and continues to make Go happen. I'd also like to thank the Go SF organizers for giving me the opportunity to talk to you. I was asked a few weeks ago, "What was the biggest…
Whenever I see code that asks what the native byte order is, it's almost certain the code is either wrong or misguided. And if the native byte order really does matter to the execution of the program, it's almost certain to be dealing with some external software that is either wrong or misguided. If your code contains #ifdef BIG_ENDIAN or the equivalent, you need to unlearn about byte order. The…
An actress acquaintance of mine—let's call her Esmerelda—once said, "I can't imagine being anything except an actress." To which the retort was given, "You can't be much of an actress then, can you?" I was reminded of this exchange when someone said to me about Go, "I can't imagine programming in a language that doesn't have generics." My retort, unspoken this time, was, "You can't be much of a…