When programming, one can write off a task quickly, or one can make components modular and reusable for the future. The latter obviously takes more time. But how much? And when it is worth the effort?
Fred Brooks in MMM summarises that reuse is a nice theory, but …
What matters more in advancing a software project, a sound technology or a sound team? The team, obviously. But how much?
In his comments to the MMM edition after 20 years, F. Brooks writes:
Some readers have found it curious that MMM devotes most of the essays to …
I consider Python to be quite a Lisp-y language, clean and nice for rapid development, with lots of libraries. One message on comp.lang.python said "I never understood why LISP was a good idea until I started playing with python".
A nice comparison of Python and Lisp …
Common Lisp has got fancy compilers that compile to native code, so it runs typically ~10 times faster than Python, see e.g. Peter Norvig's Python for Lisp Programmers. It's a dynamically typed language though, so it runs somehow slower (say 50%-100%) than statically typed OCaml/C++. Can one …
An example how to fork Unix processes and set process group in order to write a simple Apache watchdog, connecting to a web page and eventually restarting web server when the web page does not respond within a given time limit.
#! /usr/local/bin/perl -w
## name: watchdog_httpd
## author: tibor …