Interpreted vs. Compiled Languages April 28 2006
This past week I was asked a question regarding the strengths and weaknesses of compiled vs. interpreted programming languages. To further clarify my response I thought I would take a moment and write a post to illustrate all the points that apply to this often-asked question.
Interpreted Languages
Advantages:
- Rapid Prototyping: Since the code is not compiled, a step is eliminated from the test-run cycle. Thus it could be argued that interpreted languages are suitable for rapid prototyping of programs that are not resource intensive. One could normally respond to an ad-hoc request quite quickly with an interpreted language.
- Portability: Interpreted languages are relatively …
Tilting At Windmills April 21 2006
Anne Applebaum has written an informative article that shows how many morons out there are opposing wind energy. Please read the article here:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/18/AR2006041801188.html
Let us remember that wind enery is much more comforting to coal-fired plants which disperse harmful carbon dioxide and uranium into the atmosphere.
Many people will say “Well , the trees will take care of the carbon dioxide that our coal plants produce!” In fact, you would need more than 6 more Amazon rain forests worth of trees to consume the amount of carbon dioxide at our current production levels.
Stick that in your coal pipe and smoke it …
Truncate Table vs. DELETE FROM
Just a quick note that instead of deleting all the rows from a table you can also use the “TRUNCATE TABLE” command. This command has the added benefit of resetting the IDENTITY columns back to its seed value.
In other words, automatic primary keys start back at 1.
Random Numbers in .NET April 20 2006
To generate random numbers in .NET is fairly straight forward however there is one pitfall that you must avoid in order to get the numbers not bound to the clock!
DO NOT INSTANTIATE THE NUMBER GENERATOR EVERYTIME YOU GENERATE NUMBERS
In other words, if you have a method that you are calling to generate the random numbers in a library, do not create an instance everytime you are looking to generate random numbers.
Eg.
RandomLibrary.vb
public class myRandomLibrary
public function getRandNumber() as integer
Dim myRandObject as new Random
return(myRandObject.Next(1, 100))
end function
end class
This is not going to work because you are calling new() on the random number generator everytime …
Dr. Tim Flannery Talk
Blair and I had the pleasure last night of listening to a talk by Dr. Tim Flannery who is the author of “The Weather Makers“ Dr. Flannery’s work has been a real eye opener to the world regarding the fate of the earth with respect to carbon dioxide production.
Here are some facts that were highlighted at the talk:
- North America (as seen at night) is the brightest continent by far.
- One of the major source of electricity that is feeding the grid in North America is coal fired power plants.
- When coal is burned, massive amounts of carbon …