Posts

Showing posts from January, 2010

About Javascript's Good Parts.

I watched the video titled Java Script-The Good Parts , by Douglas Crockford. In the video, Douglas talked about functional language features in JavaScript. JavaScript is a popular main-stream language and yet it has nice functional language features included in LISP and Scheme. He also talked about the benefits of dynamic typing system in JavaScript. He defended this feature by saying that JavaScript code usually was small and beautiful and worked nicely for its purposes. He commented that he wrote a compiler for JavaScript once but it turned out the compilation system didn't work as fast as expected, which made him appreciate the dynamic features of JavaScript even more. For students who are interested in designing, improving, and implementing programming languages, this is an inspiring video to watch and study.

Inside Larry and Sergey's Brian

I finished reading the book " Inside Larry and Sergey's Brian " by Brandt today. Like the book cover mentioned, "the book is about Larry Page and Sergey Brin." I in general like the book because it is informative for me this time. I need read more about adword and adsense and what happened in other search engines. Brandt emphasized a lot about how the both famous guys dominate now because they are determined and they are idealists. This might be true. As a computing professional, I think the story of Google is a good case study about computational thinking, i.e., abstraction and automating. The pagerank algorithm, adword, and adsense are simple and elegant ideas. They are not complicated artifact. But they effectively automate the tasks they are supposed to perform. And the computing infrastructure, which supports the search algorithms, the advertising models, and the "cloud computing" in google, is effective, complicated, and requires to delica

Her Secret to Success

I have finished reading Kurt W. Beyer's book titled "Grace Hopper And The Invention of The Information Age." Naturally I want to know what is the secret Grace Hopper succeeded in her career. The book gave a wonderful presentation about Grace Hopper's career life. At the end of the book, it summarized several reasons that can contribute to the success of Grace Hopper. I am impressed by three listed in the book. First, she empowered youth, which seemed non-intuitive but also used by both Microsoft and Google and etc. She felt the young, inexperienced programmers can approach problems beyond "what is" and grasp "what could be". Second, since youth is fleeting, she had learned from margins during her career life. She mastered mathematics, military, insurance, aerospace engineering, etc., which resulted her intellectually informed mind was ready to approach any problem from a various of angels. And the last but not the least she embraced dist