Joel Neely

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I’m slightly older than the computing industry, and have been programming since my undergraduate days. My cellphone now has more raw compute power than some of the computers I used in graduate school. It's an exciting time to be doing software!

I listen to the Java Posse and Software Engineering Radio.

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  • Lab Rat Code

    My older son has gone back to school to study IT, and we occasionally discuss his courses or internship (though not his homework). As a graphic artist, musician, gamer, and box-builder, he is an experienced user, but thinking as a programmer is new to him. Therefore I find his perspective on programming an interesting counterpoint [...]
  • Protect Innocence against Persecuting Assault

    Convenience stores sometimes get robbed. That’s wrong. But suppose lobbyists for the convenience store industry got congress to pass legislation that would authorize the stores to: Keep assault weapons under the counters; Use them at will under a “shoot first, ask questions later” policy; and Exempt them from responsibility for using deadly force if they [...]
  • Stop Oligopolies and Paranoia, America

    There was a time when saying, “This is a nation governed by law“, brought honor and pride. That statement was associated with many others, such as, “All persons are equal before the law“, that emphasized that the same rules applied to everyone, regardless of economics, education, race, or any of the other attributes that in [...]
  • Technical deficit spending

    Hungry and in a hurry, I dropped into the diner and ordered eggs and toast. The server returned shortly with an electric skillet, a toaster, two whole eggs, and two slices of bread. As I cracked the eggs into the skillet, the server came back along the counter with a bag of coffee beans and [...]
  • Why Data Structures Matter

    Our experience on Day 0 of JPR11 yielded a nice example of the need to choose an appropriate implementation of an abstract concept. As I mentioned in the previous post, we experimented with Michael Barker’s Scala implementation of Guy Steele’s parallelizable word-splitting algorithm (slides 51-67). Here’s the core of the issue. Given a type-compatible associative [...]