Monday Links from the Sheriff's Lair vol. CCLVII

[NickFitz]

Even though C was the first language I properly learned (as an 11-year-old kid, from a Microsoft C 5.0 book my dad had lying around from before he retired*), I never fell in love with the language the way I did with C++.

*I am the only person I know who read an assembly language programming book for fun without actually ever writing any code because we didn't seem to have the compiler!

That's because you need an assembler, not a compiler

(Acorn machines had one built in to the BASIC interpreter.)

[NickFitz]

Considering the rate of attrition during the landings on Okinawa, I suspect that landing on the Japanese islands would have been even more interesting.

Which is the bit I rather disagreed with in his article.

But, as he says, they'd already decided not to do that before even testing the first bomb:

"The facts show that in early July 1945, about two weeks before the bomb was tested, Truman and senior military advisers abandoned plans to invade Japan. The success of the atomic test had no bearing on this decision. In fact, Truman had already decided that it made no sense to risk American lives invading a nation that was already comprehensively defeated, ringed by the US navy blockade, possessed few supplies or raw materials, and was being daily flattened by General Curtis LeMay’s conventional firebombing air raids, which had already burnt down 66 Japanese cities (including the air strike on Tokyo on 9-10 March 1945, which incinerated more than 100,000 civilians in a single night and is today remembered as the single most deadly bombing raid in history)."

[d000hg]

Even though C was the first language I properly learned (as an 11-year-old kid, from a Microsoft C 5.0 book my dad had lying around from before he retired*), I never fell in love with the language the way I did with C++.

*I am the only person I know who read an assembly language programming book for fun without actually ever writing any code because we didn't seem to have the compiler!

[OwlHoot]

Surely that's exactly the point he's making?

"As to Stimson’s claim that America used the bomb reluctantly – ‘our least abhorrent choice’ – suggesting that Washington and the Pentagon had wrestled painfully with alternatives, the facts demonstrate precisely the opposite. Everyone involved in making the bomb wanted, indeed hoped, to use the weapon as soon as possible, and gave no serious consideration to any other course of action. The Target and Interim Committees (the latter set up to examine the control of nuclear weapons after the war) swiftly dispensed with alternatives – for example, a warning, a demonstration, or attacking a genuine military target. In fact, Secretary of State James Byrnes rejected most of these possibilities in a few minutes over lunch in the Pentagon."

As I think the article alludes to (skimmed it quickly), they really used them to give the Russkies pause for thought.

Stalin was planning a full-scale invasion of Japan in October 1945 and, if he thought he could get away with it, might not have stopped at the agreed borders in Europe in May 1945 (or so the Yanks feared).

[NickFitz]

Not sure I agree altogether with the atom bomb thing.

Having built two of the damn things they were going to use them no matter what.

Surely that's exactly the point he's making?

"As to Stimson’s claim that America used the bomb reluctantly – ‘our least abhorrent choice’ – suggesting that Washington and the Pentagon had wrestled painfully with alternatives, the facts demonstrate precisely the opposite. Everyone involved in making the bomb wanted, indeed hoped, to use the weapon as soon as possible, and gave no serious consideration to any other course of action. The Target and Interim Committees (the latter set up to examine the control of nuclear weapons after the war) swiftly dispensed with alternatives – for example, a warning, a demonstration, or attacking a genuine military target. In fact, Secretary of State James Byrnes rejected most of these possibilities in a few minutes over lunch in the Pentagon."

[vetran]

[*]Museum of Selfies - Olivia Muus: ”This is a project that started when my friend aka. right hand and I went to the National Gallery of Denmark in Copenhagen. I took a picture for fun and liked how this simple thing could change their character and give their facial expression a whole new meaning."

[/LIST]

Happy invoicing!

love the museum of selfies great fun and as she says it changes the art dramatically.

[GlenW]

Leading to:
Object Oriented Programming is Inherently Harmful

“90% of the tulip that is popular right now wants to rub its object-oriented nutsack all over my code”

Sheer class!

[NickFitz]

Leading to:

Object Oriented Programming is Inherently Harmful

via

Why OO Sucks by Joe Armstrong

Much of the "OOP" around today seems to bear almost no relationship to OOP as originally described by Kay et al. and implemented in Smalltalk.

I'm looking at you Java, C#, C++, etc. etc.…

[zeitghost]

Actually busy at ClientCorp Read this lot for me and leave an executive summary over there somewhere.

• The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C - Damien Katz on why he keeps coming back to the venerable programming language: ”For years I've tried my damnedest to get away from C. Too simple, too many details to manage, too old and crufty, too low level… Other languages can get you to a working state faster, but in the long run, when performance and reliability are important, C will save you time and headaches. I'm painfully learning that lesson once again.”
  

Happy invoicing!

Leading to:

Object Oriented Programming is Inherently Harmful

via

Why OO Sucks by Joe Armstrong

Why OO was popular?

Reason 1 - It was thought to be easy to learn.
Reason 2 - It was thought to make code reuse easier.
Reason 3 - It was hyped.
Reason 4 - It created a new software industry.

I see no evidence of 1 and 2.

Reasons 3 and 4 seem to be the driving force behind the technology.

If a language technology is so bad that it creates a new industry to solve problems of its own making then it must be a good idea for the guys who want to make money. <he's bang on the target right there, ZG>

This is is the real driving force behind OOPs.

[NickFitz]

Actually busy at ClientCorp Read this lot for me and leave an executive summary over there somewhere.

• The Mercenary - "In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Roy was a member of Third Force Reconnaissance Company in Vietnam, an elite precursor of the Marine Special Forces… Sometimes his mix of boyish enthusiasm, marine training, and American can-do attitude got him work in the mercenary minor leagues: a body-guarding gig here, an insurance investigation there. For decades, he’d strung together a living.” Just the man to investigate a $3 million robbery at a Peruvian gold mine.
  
  
• Death is All Around Us: The Plague Pits of London - ”‘Death is all around us’ is not just a turn of phrase. It’s an actual fact, at least for those living in London. When the bubonic plague swept through the city in 1665, over 100,000 people perished. Those more poetically inclined might say these people ‘disappeared’ off the face of this Earth, as if by magic. But the truth of the matter is that they didn’t disappear.” As Chirurgeon’s Apprentice Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris explains, you might even be eating your lunchtime sandwich sat on top of them
  
  
• The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C - Damien Katz on why he keeps coming back to the venerable programming language: ”For years I've tried my damnedest to get away from C. Too simple, too many details to manage, too old and crufty, too low level… Other languages can get you to a working state faster, but in the long run, when performance and reliability are important, C will save you time and headaches. I'm painfully learning that lesson once again.”
  
  
• Sad Thanksgiving: I ate 5 frozen turkey dinners, which are gross miracles of*science - Alexis C. Madrigal samples the Thanksgiving dinner options for single people with no taste: ”When I see a frozen TV dinner filled with turkey, gravy, mashed potatoes, bread stuffing, vegetables, and cranberry sauce, I stand in awe at how many strands of science and technology have come together… These are my tasting notes for five different frozen turkey dinners I found at Walmart, with special attention to how the actual dinners stack up with the serving suggestions on their boxes.”
  
  
• Solving the Mystery of Link Imbalance: A Metastable Failure State at Scale - Interesting article by Nathan Bronson of Facebook on tracking down and fixing problems that only occur at massive scale: ”For two years, we tackled this problem at the switch level. We worked with our vendors to detect imbalance and rapidly rotate the hash function’s seed when it occurred. This kept the problem manageable. As our systems grew, however, this auto-remediation system stopped working as well. Often, when we would drain an imbalanced link the problem would just move to another one. It was clear that we needed to understand the root cause.”
  
  
• Another Day, Another Pound - "In 1988, Harold Snoad, producer and director of the third and fourth series of Ever Decreasing Circles, wrote a book for BBC Television Training called Directing Situation Comedy… At the time, Snoad was working on the fourth series of Ever Decreasing Circles, and the book contains a handful of on-set and on-location pictures.” An inside look at how sitcoms were (and probably still are) put together.
  
  
• Why People Keep Trying to Erase the Hollywood Sign From Google Maps - "The Hollywood Sign might be one of the most recognizable things on Earth. In Los Angeles, it's also one of the most visible. You can see it from a plane as you glide into LAX. You can see it from a car as you drive up the 101 freeway. But a group of people who live near the sign are trying to hide it, even as it looms in the hills, in plain sight. By removing it from Google Maps."
  
  
• Barbarians at the Gateways: High-frequency Trading and Exchange Technology - Former trader Jacob Loveless on the technology underpinning HFT operations: ”Imagine every day you have to figure out a small part of the world. You develop fantastic machines, which can measure everything, and you deploy them to track an object falling. You analyze a million occurrences of this falling event, and along with some of the greatest minds you know, you discover gravity… You test it with your colleagues and say, 'I will drop this apple from my hand, and it will hit the ground in 3.2 seconds,' and it does. Then two weeks later, you go to a large conference. You drop the apple in front of the crowd...and it floats up and flies out the window. Gravity is no longer true; it was, but it isn't now. That's HFT. As soon as you discover it, you have only a few weeks to capitalize on it; then you have to start all over.”
  
  
• Why Americans Have Been Duped over the Use of the Atomic Bomb - Historian Paul Ham argues that the supposed reason for the use of nuclear weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki is actually a post-facto rationalisation: ”In an article bearing the name of Henry Stimson, the then octogenarian former War Secretary, and written by Truman fixers, the American government invented the notion that the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were ‘our least abhorrent choice’, avoided a land invasion of Japan and saved hundreds of thousands of American lives… The article’s case for the use of the weapon was profoundly flawed. Most erroneously it argued that a land invasion of Japan and the atomic weapons were mutually exclusive – a case of either-or. This nexus was made up after the war. In 1945, it was never a case of “either the bomb or the invasion.” The question did not arise.”
  
  
• Museum of Selfies - Olivia Muus: ”This is a project that started when my friend aka. right hand and I went to the National Gallery of Denmark in Copenhagen. I took a picture for fun and liked how this simple thing could change their character and give their facial expression a whole new meaning."
  
  
  

Happy invoicing!