Joel Neely 
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.
- Location: Memphis
- Company: FedEx Services
- Website/Blog: http://joelneely.wordpress.com/
Topics:
Blog Feed:
- Book Review: R in a Nutshell
R is a statistical computing environment that is fully-compliant with state-of-the-art buzzwords: free, open-source, cross-platform, interactive, graphics, objects, closures, higher-order functions, and more. It is supported by an impressive collection of user-supplied modules through CRAN, the “Comprehensive R Archive Network”. (Sound familiar?) And now it has its own O’Reilly Nutshell book, R in a Nutshell, [...]
- Artist, graph thyself!
Visual representations of graph structures have been important to programming from the beginning of the craft – earlier than that, if you count circuit diagrams. Most practicing programmers of my acquaintance have struggled with visual complexity as the size or amount of detail of such a diagram increases. So I was interested in an article [...]
- Don’t return null; use a tail call
Why should an object-oriented programmer care about tail-call elimination? Isn’t that just another esoteric functional programming concept? Maybe not. Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, a common technique for performing a subroutine call worked this way: The caller stored the address at which it wished to resume execution in a known place (e.g. adjacent to [...]
- From Whose Perspective?
Java Posse Roundup 2010 is now history, and I’m still digesting and pondering. But one “Aha!” moment was worth posting quickly. During a discussion on productivity and job satisfaction, a participant stated a view that I suspect many of us have shared: “If I can get to the office early, I can get my work [...]
- Why lists are not primitive
Yesterday’s SICP study group call indulged briefly in the “why LISP hasn’t caught on” theme. I suggested that some programmers seem to have a limited tolerance for abstraction, and cited the well-known Primitive Obsession anti-pattern as evidence. One of the other participants (I’m sorry that I don’t know all the voices yet) challenged that statement. [...]
