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maradyddVia Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror, The C Programming Language by Brian W Kernighan and Dennis M Ritchie and HP Lovecraft. My favourite part:
Unrelatedly, was woken by the postman this morning from a dream in which I was giving a talk about error-correcting codes, failures in spoken communication, and formality of register, at a feminist conference (!), using the OSI network stack as an analogy (!!). I had just got through the obvious parts about how explicit, simple protocols and robust error-correction at the application layer reduce misinterpretation (for some reason, my example for that was a bingo game), but when the protocol has no built-in error correction and can be fragmented, the rate of confusion rises (I think where I was going with that was some kind of analogy between natural language and fragmented IP datagrams), but then the doorbell woke me up.
I had heard tales of the... thing that C.A.R. Hoare had summoned up in '62– dark hints of choosing one element from an array, and partitioning the rest into lesser and greater sets, and hellishly recursing until the data were twisted into a sorted list– but nothing I could have imagined would be in any way comparable to the daemoniac, blasphemous reality that I saw.I think any second-semester sophomore encountering quicksort for the first time knows exactly how the narrator feels.
Unrelatedly, was woken by the postman this morning from a dream in which I was giving a talk about error-correcting codes, failures in spoken communication, and formality of register, at a feminist conference (!), using the OSI network stack as an analogy (!!). I had just got through the obvious parts about how explicit, simple protocols and robust error-correction at the application layer reduce misinterpretation (for some reason, my example for that was a bingo game), but when the protocol has no built-in error correction and can be fragmented, the rate of confusion rises (I think where I was going with that was some kind of analogy between natural language and fragmented IP datagrams), but then the doorbell woke me up.
