The MIT Mystery Hunt starts this Friday at noon, and I’ll be participating seriously for about my 10th year. In the hunt, teams solve a collection of puzzles to discover the location of a gold coin hidden somewhere on campus. The puzzles may be numerous (sometimes over 100), are generally provided without instructions (except when [...]

If you’ve talked to me about programming languages and Wall Street in the last 4 years, I’ve probably mentioned kx. This is a company which makes a combination programming environment and database based on a language called q which is derived from APL. (Yes, APL, the language invented in 1957 before there was a [...]

I’m still in Montreal, and still thinking about a lot of what I saw and learned at OOSPLA. But I wanted to jot down some links while the cool things were still fresh in my mind. So here is a short set of links worth following that I picked up while at OOPSLA.

Today was my first day at OOPSLA 2007 in Montreal. After a brief exposure to the amazing “Underground City” (really a shopping mall that is infecting downtown like a cancer), I crashed a workshop for which I had not signed up, and had a completely different experience than I had planned at The Popularity [...]

I was at MIT today and so I ended up going to an invited talk on computer architecture, Subtle Semantics and Unrestricted Implementation of Transactional Memory. Transactional Memory is a very hot topic in systems and architecture. It is perceived to be a better model for programmers, so language designers like it. And there are [...]