Our new grandson now has a name: Gavin Michael Franklin Evanini.
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(Click thumbnail for big picture.) We have a new grandson, as yet unnamed. Baby Evanini was Born January 1, 2009 at 2:38 AM at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia to Jamie and Keelan Evanini. He was 8 lbs 4 oz, 21-1/4 inches long, and perfect.
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Take a look at this.
This month's Monad.Reader has an interesting article by Yaron Minsky on adoption of O'Caml by a Wall Street firm for financial and trading software. Excerpts:
One of the things we noticed very quickly when we started hiring people to
program in OCaml was that the average quality of applicants we saw was
much higher than what we saw when trying to hire, say, Java programmers.
It’s not that there aren’t really talented Java programmers out there;
there are. It’s just that for us, finding them was much harder. The density
of bright people in the OCaml community is impressive, and it shows up in
hiring and when reading the OCaml mailing list and when reading the software
written by people in the community. That pool of talent is probably the single
best thing about OCaml from our point of view.
...
It has been my experience and the experience of most of the OCaml programmers
I’ve known that the object system in OCaml is basically a mistake. The presence
of objects in OCaml is perhaps best thought of as an attractive nuisance.
Objects in ML should be at best a last resort. Things that other languages
do with objects are in ML better achieved using features like parametric
polymorphism, union types and functors. Unfortunately, programmers coming
in from other languages where objects are the norm tend to use OCaml’s objects
as a matter of course, to their detriment. In the hundreds of thousands of
lines of OCaml at Jane Street, there are only a handful of uses of objects,
and most of those could be eliminated without much pain.
My copy of Let's
Discover F Words (which I heard about at
Language Log)
just arrived. (It's a $0.79 closeout.)
Notwithstanding the hilarious title, it's full of charming ink and
watercolor illustrations in the Little Golden Book style by
Louise Gordon.
Here
is a 1954 letter from then-President Eisenhower to his brother. Note
particularly the fourth paragraph:
Now it is true that I believe this country is following a dangerous trend
when it permits too great a degree of centralization of governmental
functions. I oppose this--in some instances the fight is a rather
desperate one. But to attain any success it is quite clear that the
Federal government cannot avoid or escape responsibilities which the mass
of the people firmly believe should be undertaken by it. The political
processes of our country are such that if a rule of reason is not
applied in this effort, we will lose everything--even to a possible and
drastic change in the Constitution. This is what I mean by my constant
insistence upon "moderation" in government. Should any political party
attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate
labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again
in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course,
that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you
possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires,
and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their
number is negligible and they are stupid.
U.S. Patent #7129940, "Shot rendering method and apparatus", issued on October 31, 2006. Inventors are Rob Cook and Tom Duff.
Old News has
items that have fallen off the New list.
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