Programming Blog

In case you've been living under a rock and having seen Google's announcement of Go here's a tip - it's designed by Ken Thompson. Ring any bells? He's the guy who along with Dennis Richie created this little thing called Unix (which virtually every one of the top 100 supercomputers in the world as well as at least half of the Smartphone market runs variants of) and another little thing call the C language. Yes, most every other language was either based on C or used parts of it. Even today Linux is written in C. Had Go just been yet another beta project from Google I wouldn't have paid attention but if Ken says there was a need for a new language then I'm going to take it serious.

Here's the link - golang.org. Since I've just started playing with it I can't tell you if it's any good or not. I also can't tell you whether it's worth learning or not since I don't know the answer to that yet. I will however, tell you that I'm going to play with it and depending on my thoughts I may or may not dedicate a sectin of this site to it. At first glance it looks like compiled Python. Anyway here's how to install it for x86_64 on Ubuntu 10.10.

Sometimes if you know a few things about programming you can see mistakes other programmers have made. You could probably even find them in the code if you had it for review. A great example is of an email I got today from someone who supposedly saw me on a website. I'd assume this website was a dating site had the variable not been empty when the email went out.

Hello , I came across your profie in () and I will like us to have a good Relationship and to know much better .my name is Ann, i am single and never marriage.I will wait for your reply . you can contact me at this my email address (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) so that i can send you my picture and more about myself. waiting to hear from you . PLEASE CONTACT ME DIRECTLY WITH THIS EMAIL (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.)

It looks like I must have been hanging out on the site called () or perhaps I'm supposed to insert something in there depending on my own online dating habits. Or perhaps the programmer isn't parsing his junk properly or maybe they got my name from some data mining source and there wasn't anything in the dating site: field so it came up blank. Interestingly the parenthesis were included in the email.  In the spirit of this post I was going to include a picture of a shirt I once bought that had a very 1950s Hollywood TV looking blond woman with a tear in her eye and the caption said "I can't believe I didn't declare my variables". Funny but the t-shirt is now gone and apparently any trace of the design on the Internet has gone missing as well.