We’ve finally reached the point in this series that I’ve been waiting for. In this post I am going to share the most crucial piece of floating-point math knowledge that I have. Here it is:[Floating-point] math is hard.You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly hard it is. I mean, you may think it’s difficult to calculate when trains from Chicago and Los Angeles will collide, but that’s just peanuts to floating-point math.Seriously. Each time I think that I’ve wrapped my head around the subtleties and implications of floating-point math ...

During last semester I was attending Multiprocessor Architectures course, given at Facultad de Informática where I study my Computer Science degree.As part of the assignments due to pass the course, we had to do several programs written in C to benchmark matrix multiplication by testing different techniques and technologies. First of all we had to do a secuential program in three different versions:A normal one where the result matrix is ordered by rows and the loops range the matrix by rows tooAn “inter” version where the result matrix is ordered by rows but the loops range the...

Like most programmers, I was attracted to Scheme by the promise that it would make me a better programmer. I came to appreciate the functional style, but swapped to Haskell, a more developed language with a rapidly developing standard library. Unfortunately, for me, Haskell can’t yet replace C++ on a day to day basis, so I reluctantly spend my days tapping away at C++. So, were the promises true? has functional programming made me a better programmer?Better is a tough question, I have no benchmarks for the quality of my code before and after Haskell, but it has certainly changed my c...

Many people call HTML5 an Adobe Flash replacement and I agree. Adobe already discontinued Flash on mobile devices. So HTML5 Video is a must for video on mobile phones and tablets. On the desktop Flash Video players are used more than HTML5 Video players but HTML5 video will work with a current web browser on a site that supports HTML5 video. Commercial video sites like YouTube will play partnered content in Flash even if you turned on HTML5 video at http://www.youtube.com/html5. I assume the reason for this is HTML5 video doesn’t really support DRM. The HTML5 v...

“Common what?” is a common reply I get when I mention Common Lisp. Perhaps rightly so, since Common Lisp is not all that common these days.Developed in the sixties, it is one of the oldest programming languages out there. In its heydays it was used mostly for Artificial Intelligence research at MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon and the like, and therefore has a lingering association with AI. People not in AI shy away from Lisp. Common Lisp is a powerful and versatile programming language that can and should be used more often in other paradigms. It saddens me to see that Common L...

Dart is a new programming language from Google and after coding JavaScript for over one year now, I immediately felt in love with it. Coming from the Java world I had a good bunch of things I had to learn before I could use JavaScript.Some people say, you need to dig deep into JavaScript, otherwise you are not allowed to speak about the pros and cons of a language. I am not a JavaScript Ninja. But I strongly believe a programming language should be easy to learn, easy to understand and should be consequent in terms of language constructs. Even after all the long time I dealt with JavaScripts w...

What will programming in Objective-C mean to the C++ programmerDifferent Object Oriented LanguagesAlmost all of us have heard the term object oriented programming, and most of us have used C++. How will Apple's purchase of NeXT, and NeXT's framework using Objective-C affect us as we develop software? If we know C++ already, how hard will it be to get up to speed on Objective-C? Many people will agree that once they understand the concepts of object oriented programming it doesn't matter which language they use. To a degree this is true, but development is easier if the programmer adopts a prog...

Procotols, programming languages and operating systems all compete in a constantly evolving software ecosystem. Out of that ecosystem only a few technologies truly have staying power and survive over the long term. An example? How about Ethernet? It’s been a survivor over the last thirty years despite existing in a constantly changing landscape that’s been populated with many worthy competitors. Ethernet’s grasp has been so strong, there even an informal law, known as Metcalfe’s second law, that says “nev...