kugelfish

The most widely and commercially used languages today are largely based on the imperative and structured programming paradigms and many have a direct and strong roots in the C language of the early seventies. Even though there seems to have been little fundamental change in main stream programming languages over the  last 40 years, there have been subtle shifts in usage patterns, even for things as simple and fundamentally low-level as doing some things repeatedly or in a loop. As a perfectly and randomly useless example to illustrate the evolution of looping, we are creating a list of squared numbers from the positive members of an input list. In C or any similar imperative language of its time, the most basic way to do something like this would be something like: out_size = 0; for (i = 0; i < in_size; i++) { if (a[i] > 0) { b[out_size++] = a[i] * a[i]; } } Languages like C++ and Java, which includes a standard library of higher level collection data types,...

On Feb 29, the Raspberry Pi foundation launched the sales of a $25 credit-card sized computer, which sold out in minutes. The goal of the Raspberry Pi is to stimulate computer literacy education in schools, inspired by the impact which the BBC Micro computer had on schools in the UK - compared with a similar wave of popular home-computers elsewhere - e.g. the Commodore 64 . I understand the elements of nostalgia of people growing up around the 1980ies for the time when computers where new and exciting. Around that time, I thought myself programming in C and M68000 assembler on a Commodore Amiga and probably learned more in basic understanding about programming and computer architecture than during the years afterwards in engineering school. The home-computers of that era were hackable enough to encourage tinkering and simple enough to allow really getting to the bottom of how they worked. The gap between what could be produced by determined hobbyists and professional software pu...

Recently I was looking around for cheapest, smallest device which easily can run linux and which can be bought in small quantities down to one. The particular application in mind was to build a linux based print-server which exposes legacy USB or network connected printers via Apple AirPrint for iPads and iPhones or Google CloudPrint for ChromeBooks or some Android devices and maybe could provide some other services to such thin-client, "cloud-top" devices (local file server and/or backup, wifi/network gateway etc.). A few years ago, I had a first compact, fan-less home-server in the form-factor of a mac-mini, i.e. about the foot-print of the optical drive it contains. Like the mac-mini, this was basically a compact PC, made largely out of laptop parts. It seems that the clear winner in terms of cost today is the new Raspberry Pi board at $25/$35, whose launch this week caused an Apple-style opening-hour stampede on the online store selling its first production batch...