Carrying on from previous entry: I’m still not well, on day 5 now. My ear infection decided to check out the other ear and then move down into my nose (gave me a stinking cold). Almost OK today but get a little dizzy when I move about. I’m having a lot of trouble writing this because my short term memory is fragmented and motor skills not what they should be.

Read Neal Stevenso’sCryptonomicon while I was ill. Enjoyed it, but not as much as his later stuff. I think he was still finding his voice a bit when he wrote it. Not sure but think it was the first book after Snow Crash, and in terms of ambition and writing several more levels of magnitude beyond it – he does carry it off brilliantly, just not as smoothly as in the later work. I also like it when a writer knows his grammar and words and uses them well, and he does. Starting to want to look at codes and keystreams now but keeping myself back. Recommend Snow Crash, if you are a computer type, rip roaring and very funny. Some of the reviewers on Amazon can’t get the joke though, which is a bit sad.

Archive Fragments

I need about another 20k words to make it work properly in terms of size. Have been reading up on submission sizes and e-submissions and at 48k it’s not quite long enough. Needs to be 60-100k. I have the material outline but have been too ill to do much about it.  Hey ho. I probably cut 10k (and wrote 5 or so new) from the 2006 draft because I thought it did’t carry the story, but not sure I will put it back in. New material is needed, and I probably need to do some research.

Java is NOT Object Oriented!

See http://www.archive.org/details/DanIngal1989 , way way back in 1989! Everything should be an object. Also note the way that, in the factorial example he gives the integer quietly changes from a small integer to a large one without any messing about, true polymorphism – Java does not do this. So Smalltalk, Python and Ruby meet his criteria, Java does not. Java kept that C++ nonsense about handling types differently. It’s also interesting (in the Q&A section of the talk) to note that he thinks that strongly typed variables are pointless – but you do need to be able to to typeof to ensure that the object will meet a predefined contract.

I found this from http://www.cryptonomicon.net/msh/.