Some time ago, perhaps even as far as a year ago, I was just starting to watch conferences and lectures in my extensively useful youtube account, on topics like λ‑Calculus or Category Theory, when on a conference by Bartosz Milewski on Categories, he threw a brilliant sentence, that speaks something like this: «Humans shouldn’t downgrade […]
What have I learnt from installing Linux on my new laptop
A few points about my experience buying a new laptop and going experimental the whole road, with linux.
The life and death of a piece of code
How is code born? What do good developers look for when they write their code? The development of a system can be measured by its trade-offs. Some systems cannot be slow, some others cannot fail, some others cannot be too expensive. All systems want to have everything, obviously. But they cannot, obviously. Before we study […]
Processors, Part Three: the Future. New models.
If one big complex thread being executed too fast is risky as we saw, because there’s a physical limit to sheer clock speed and cheating optimisations are unsafe, then, we all know the other option: what about doing many simple and small things independently? To put it differently: if we cannot make the clock any […]
Processors, Part Two: the Present. Meltdown and Spectre
Imagine a restaurant. A professional chef, in charge of the best pizzas in town, and nobody knows how’re they done. It’s such a secret, those magic ingredients. And imagine a bunch of apprentices, supposed to help him. Imagine them following the chef’s orders. And then see, the chef going to the fridge to take some […]
Paris, the fourth
My fourth visit to Paris since this blog started with the first – and finally one from which I got a reasonable amount of drawings!
Living inside a story
Some time around 2010, give or take a year, I was on one of these family holidays with all the uncles around. Some treasure unearthed from grandpa’s eclectic bookshelf made the rounds. Someone had randomly taken the book out and after a few pages started reading a bunch of memorable passages out loud to the […]
Processors, Part One: the Past. The Architecture
How to widen the bottleneck of processing? If the solution were trivial, it wouldn’t merit a post – in fact the workarounds are of the kind that’s easy to invent but hard to formalise. Like the megapixels are not a true indicator of the quality of a camera, or the decibels are not a true […]
On so called low-level and performant languages
Last time, we dug into a new debate: are languages really decoupled from the hardware that runs them? Are the semantics of a language modelling mainstream hardware, and should they? Can we escape to new models of hardware, and new models of semantics? We saw that Backus made a good point arguing that languages have […]
Backus on Von Neumann at the Turing Award
On a previous post, we talked about Von Neumann’s Turing Complete model for a computer. A CPU, some Memory, and I/O. It was beautiful, but it had its disadvantages, and an unfortunate legacy. Today, John Backus will lead our journey through these matters. Enter Sandman: Backus 32 years later, a thorough critique was addressed, ironically, […]