You are currently browsing the daily archive for December 5th, 2007.
The PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) test is administered to 15 year olds in industrialized countries every three years. The 2006 results were just released and show that US students are ranked 17th out of 30 in science and 24th in math. About 1.3% of students reached the highest level on the test overall with New Zealand and Finland having the most star pupils at 3.9%. [source (Note: may require free registration)]
The snow continues here. Today it was covering the road. When I took Daedalus and Willow out in the morning, they both weren’t having any of it. Daedal balked at the door and Willow was stepping gingerly and obvious wondering what had gone wrong with the world. They finally got used to it, though the poor boy was shivering his butt off after a short while. Willow was more in her element. We’re gonna have to get him paw gloves.
Here is the scene out my office window. They are currently building the new Computer Science Complex here. One of the buildings is the Gates Center. You can actually see shots from the live webcam 24/7, though the show is quite boring after about 4:30pm or so these days. What’s amazing to me is that people are out there working right now. In South Carolina, construction work ended as soon as the sky darkened and rain fell. If snow fell, it would be like the end of the world had come. I don’t think this makes them any faster, though. Another bizarre difference between construction crews here and there is that there are no hispanic people here. This is a very bad thing as it also means there’s crap for Mexican food. You could find good Mexican every time you turned around in SC.
I discovered the java.util.Properties class a couple weeks ago in the ginormous Java API docs. If you’ve ever created a software project where you have a lot of different settings that change frequently, this is the class for you. In my research, I implement all these different algorithms for various things, find out they don’t work, implement something else, rinse, repeat. Being able to look back at my results from two months ago and then loading the exact same configuration and running the experiment all over again is a must. Enter the Properties class.
From the most excellent xkcd:
I felt the exact same way when I first picked up python. It was like finding the holy grail of programming languages. To be able to just throw things into a list and access them without having to worry about casting. To throw around functions like they were variables. To weave functions out of thin air and watch them vanish when their usefulness had expired. It was magic.
Of course, the honeymoon faded. I still use python as a first resort. As a programming language for exploring new ideas, it can’t be beaten. Development time is ridiculously fast. There has been effort to get the runtime up to snuff as well, but with much reluctance I’m forced to admit it doesn’t compare to C or even Java, may God have mercy on my soul. Granted, it all depends on the application, blah blah blah.
Despite all that, I still love it. It’s definitely first in my heart as far as programming languages go.
