Daily Archives:January 26th, 2012

Smart Energy – now it’s personal

PilgrimMy pal Pilgrim Beart gave a splendid talk at the IET last week, about smart energy monitoring.

Click here to watch the webcast.

45 mins of talk, 45 mins of questions. Well worth the time.

Humour for Geeks

If you’re an elderly Computer Scientist (i.e. older than about 35), you’ll enjoy James Iry’s post, A Brief, Incomplete and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages. Extract:

1957 – John Backus and IBM create FORTRAN. There’s nothing funny about IBM or FORTRAN. It is a syntax error to write FORTRAN while not wearing a blue tie.

1958 – John McCarthy and Paul Graham invent LISP. Due to high costs caused by a post-war depletion of the strategic parentheses reserve LISP never becomes popular. In spite of its lack of popularity, LISP (now “Lisp” or sometimes “Arc”) remains an influential language in “key algorithmic techniques such as recursion and condescension”.

Splendid stuff! – Many thanks to Dave Clarke for the link.

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser