In praise of Knuth and Liskov

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Youth has its advantages; perhaps the most striking is that we can, in our own lifetime, meet in person some of the very founders of our discipline. No living physicist has seen Newton; no chemist has heard Lavoisier. For us, it works. Today, Ladies and Gentlemen, we have the honor of introducing two of the undisputed pioneers of informatics.




Publish no loop without its invariant

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There may be no more blatant example of the disconnect between the software engineering community and the practice of programming than the lack of widespread recognition for the fundamental role of loop invariants.







Speech synthesis technology

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Rereading an article from last year’s August New Yorker, a discussion of e-paper devices and especially the Kindle by Nicholson Baker [1]: Reading some of “Max,” a James Patterson novel, I experimented with the text-to-speech feature. The robo-reader had a polite, halting, Middle European intonation, like Tom Hanks in “The Terminal,” and it was sometimes … Read more