Computer Science

The Bw-Tree: A B-tree for New Hardware microsoft.com/en-us/research…

'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.' -- Andy Finkel

"Computer science basically got started in the 1930s when Turing and Church just laid down what the theory of everything was. They just said, here's how computation works. And then we've spent 90 years since then just exploring consequences of that and gradually building up more and more interesting ideas."

Leibniz [1646-1716] studied symbolic logic and built a sort of computer. johndcook.com/blog/2013/04/0…

Functional Programming Fundamentals. 13 lectures by @headinthebox channel9.msdn.com/Series/C9-Lect…

my system handles an edge case i didn't account for

A more efficient implementation of Shor's algorithm lwn.net/Articles/10661…

The original Lisp paper. McCarthy 1960 www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/recursive.…

How to compute the square root of a complex number, avoiding floating point problems. johndcook.com/blog/2020/06/0…

'Projects promoting programming in 'natural language' are intrinsically doomed to fail.' -- Edsger Dijkstra

Why functional programming matters cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/d… [pdf]

Floating Point NaN in #dlang NaNs are a very underappreciated feature of IEEE-754 floating point. In the D programming language, floats get default initialized to NaN, not to 0.0. double y = 0.0; // initialized to 0.0 double x; // initialized to NaN The discussion routinely comes up as "why not default initialize to 0.0?" The reason is a routine mistake in programming is forgetting to initialize a variable. With a floating point 0.0, one may never realize that the floating point calculation results are wrong. But with NaN, the result of a floating point computation will be NaN, which is unlikely to go unnoticed. I don't know of any other programming language with this safety feature. Also, the D `char` type is initialized to 0xFF, not 0, because Unicode says that 0xFF is an invalid character.

Sleep sort beust.com/weblog/2011/06…

Popcount: Counting 1's in a bitstream johndcook.com/blog/2020/02/2…

You can beat the binary search lemire.me/blog/2026/04/2…

'If it's your decision, it's design; if not, it's a requirement.' -- Alistair Cockburn

Denotational Semantics: A methodology for language development scss.tcd.ie/Andrew.Butterf… [pdf] by David A. Schmidt

Programming on Parallel Machines: GPU, Multicore, Clusters and More heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/parprocbook // free ebook

'Inside every large program is a small program trying to get out.' -- Tony Hoare

Writing software for someone else johndcook.com/blog/2012/05/3…