Now on ScienceBlogs: And so, driven on ceaselessly toward new shores
Finding the fun in good math; Shredding bad math and squashing the crackpots who espouse it.
Mark Chu-Carroll (aka MarkCC) is a PhD Computer Scientist, who works for Google as a Software Engineer. My professional interests center on programming languages and tools, and how to improve the languages and tools that are used for building complex software systems.
Category: programming
My good friend and blogfather, Orac, posted something yesterday about animal testing in medical laboratories. I've been meaning to write something about that for a while; now seems like a good time. I'm not someone who thinks that being...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 3:26 PM • 20 Comments •
Category: Abstract Algebra
Since I mentioned the idea of monoids as a formal models of computations, John Armstrong made the natural leap ahead, to the connection between monoids and monads - which are a common feature in programming language semantics, and a...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 10:57 AM • 5 Comments •
Category: programming
Today is the 70th birthday of Donald Knuth. If you don't know who Knuth is, then you're not a programmer. If you're a programmer and you don't know who Knuth is, well... I have no idea what rock you've...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 11:38 AM • 65 Comments •
Category: programming
One of the problems with many of the interesting graph algorithms is that they're complex. As graphs get large, computations over them can become extremely slow. For example, graph coloring is NP-complete - so the time to run a...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 9:59 AM • 14 Comments •
Category: Pi Calculus
Since my post on datatypes for my π-calculus language, I've gotten a bunch of questions from people who (I guess) picked up on the series after the original post where I said that the idea of the series was...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 9:47 PM • 33 Comments •
Category: Basics
For the basics, I wrote a bunch of stuff about sorting. It seems worth taking a moment to talk about something related: binary search. Binary search is one of the most important and fundamental algorithms, and it shows up...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 12:08 PM • 14 Comments •
Category: programming
I feel like a bit of a change of pace, and trying a bit of an experiment. Re-reading Backus's old FP work reminds me of what I was doing the last time I read it, which was back in...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 8:53 PM • 26 Comments •
Category: programming
In my earlier post about John Backus, I promised to write something about his later work on functional programming languages. While I was in a doctors office getting treated for an awful cough, I re-read his 1977 Turing Award...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 5:00 PM • 22 Comments •
Category: Basics
Many people would probably say that things like computability and the halting program aren't basics. But I disagree: many of our basic intuitions about numbers and the things that we can do with them are actually deeply connected with...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 10:05 PM • 36 Comments •
Category: Basics
As long as I'm doing all of these basics posts, I thought it would be worth explaining just what a Turing machine is. I frequently talk about things being Turing equivalent, and about effective computing systems, and similar things,...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 6:38 PM • 18 Comments •
