I’ve been trying to wrap my head around this incredible moment in history. In trying to wrap my head around it, I’m turning to what I know best: programs, programming, and software-intensive systems. And their flaws. This is a mini-essay on how the line between software systems and social systems is completely blurred, and how […]

As a computer scientist specializing in programming, the social consequences of software-for-business-efficiency are worrying me more and more. Here at home, we’ve been having a conversation about what post-capitalism would look like in the face of quasi-universal automation, in the best case scenario. It’s really hard to tie all the loose ends of such a vision. […]

How many more security flaws do we need to go through before people accept the fact that almost all of them have a single root cause: the use of C?

The market of scientific publications is such an organic mess, there’s no end to topics that can be beaten over their heads. This post is about “open access” publications. Lately there has been a push back against publishers that keep their content behind pay walls, coupled with a big favoritism for publishers that offer their […]

Some conversations I’ve been having over the past year led me to a deeper exploration of the issue of conferences vs. journals in Computer Science. The debate, so far, seems to be missing a few critical observations regarding scientific journals and our own ACM, and therefore it is somewhat incomplete. This essay lays out my […]

I recently watched a TED talk with a fun topic: why is ‘x’ used as the unknown variable in Algebra and beyond? If you haven’t seen it, this 4-min talk is above. The thesis is this: x is used, because the Spanish, who were the first to translate the great scientific and engineering knowledge coming […]

What is the single most important feature of a programming system without which you can’t write programs effectively?

Imagine this. You have a brilliant idea for how to reverse the effects of aging in female infertility, a wonderful combination of drugs that you have been developing in your lab with your graduate students, and that will open the possibility of motherhood to hundreds of thousands of women who waited just too long to […]

A lot has been written about Facebook’s and Google’s requirements for people to sign up with real world names. That requirement seems pretty silly to me, as the concepts of identity and personas seem to have a cognitive dimension that goes well beyond the tyranny of singular physicality — even in real life!

Yesterday I posted part I of my bad conference review war stories. Today, I’m posting part II — and, hopefully, last! This was the first incident I experienced with bad reviews, and it illustrates the phenomenon much better. This incident happened back in 2007 on a technical paper we submitted to the International Conference on […]