Wandering Thoughts: Recent Entries

Link: Go at Google: Language Design in the Service of Software Engineering

Go at Google: Language Design in the Service of Software Engineering is an article version of a Rob Pike keynote on, well, let me just quote:

The Go programming language was conceived in late 2007 as an answer to some of the problems we were seeing developing software infrastructure at Google. [...]

Go was designed and developed to make working in this environment more productive. [...]

The article then discusses what this means and how various aspects of Go's design were consciously shaped by a number of pragmatic software engineering issues in building large software across large(r) teams. I find it really interesting reading (and I keep referring to it and having to re-find it, so it's clearly time to put this somewhere more obvious).

Link: Getting Real About Distributed System Reliability

Jay Kreps' Getting Real About Distributed System Reliability is a very interesting discussion of the reliability of distributed systems in the real world. He patiently explains that a number of assumptions normally made to reason about this are in fact wrong in practice, especially the assumption that failures are independent. I'm not going to try to summarize his entry beyond that; go read it instead.

(I suspect that his logic extends to all real systems, not just distributed ones, and in any case he has given me a lot to think about.)

By the way, several of the links in his entry are themselves worth following and reading carefully.

(I believe I got this from my Twitter stream but I cannot find the original source now.)

Link: Filenames.WTF

In Filenames.WTF, Daniel Rutter runs down the reasons first why paying attention to file extensions is ridiculous, and then the reasons why it's still the best solution to the problem that we have. Spoiler: it's because people have spent decades creating file formats that suck.

(Via philliph on Twitter.)

Another Russ Cox regexp article: How Google Code Search Worked

Russ Cox has just added another article in his series on regular expressions; this one is titled Regular Expression Matching with a Trigram Index, or How Google Code Search Worked. It's as worthwhile as all of the previous three.

Link: Russ Cox's articles on regular expressions

If you have any interest in regular expression matching, especially efficient regexps and understanding why Perl, Python, and so on have sometimes oddly slow implementations, you really want to read Russ Cox's series of articles on regular expressions.

The core things to read are his three part series, Regular Expression Matching Can Be Simple And Fast, Regular Expression Matching: the Virtual Machine Approach, and Regular Expression Matching in the Wild.

(I know, this is late, since Hacker News discussed this a couple of years ago (plus the comment here). The gears of my link-pointing machinery evidently grind very slowly, but better late than never.)

Link: Pollution in 1.0.0.0/8

IANA has recently allocated 1.0.0.0/8 to APNIC, which has caused a certain amount of concern that it is 'polluted' by people already using it for various reasons. Pollution in 1/8 is a report from RIPE Labs on what happened when they announced routing for some bits of it as part of their debogonising work.

This is clearly going to be what they call 'interesting'.

(via Hacker News.)

Link: Using colour well in data visualization

Why Should Engineers and Scientists Be Worried About Color? is about how straightforward use of colour in data visualizations can mislead you and hide information (and how to do better). Some of their examples are eye-opening and alarming.

(Via Hacker News.)

(Since I took up photography I've had a much increased interest in how we perceive things, including colour.)

The quote of the time interval, on XML

From an article by Henri Sivonen:

Draconian error handling creates an unstable equilibrium in Game Theory terms—it only lasts until one player breaks the rule. One non-Draconian XML5 implementation in a key client product and the Draconian XML ranks would break.

(Discovered through Mark Pilgrim, specifically his firehose.)

Applications to XHTML are left as an exercise for the reader.

Link: XML on the web summarized

The link of the time interval comes from the online comic strip Bonobo Conspiracy, which neatly summarizes the reality of XML on the web in today's strip.

Link: you are what you code

From Robert Brewer comes You are what you code, which has given me something to think about. I'll quote the opening:

Hey, you. Do you realize what you're writing? The long-standing IT joke is that you always end up coding your own job out of existence. But what are you coding yourself into?

(From Planet Python, where his blog is aggregated.)

Update: I apologize to my readers for putting a link here that doesn't work without an extra, annoying step (see the comment).

Update2: the situation has now been fixed.