blog.zacbrown.org - just run away, now.

I was browsing reddit today and ran across a blog entry by Shannon Behrens. He was discussing odd hangups that different CS people that he knew had, specifically the bright ones. Now I’m not sure I consider myself any sort of beaming, radiant, CS luminary with profound ideas but I consider myself a pretty good programmer.

Shannon mentioned that his major hangup is that he’s an open source fanatic, that is he’ll use a lesser product if it means the difference between using proprietary software and open source software. Now this isn’t a terribly bad hang up in my opinion, though I can see how some might see it as out of hand if you get into the blurry zone of proprietary drivers for video cards and the like. Now Shannon’s hangup sounds a lot like my friend Andrew A.’s hangup. He too is obessesive about using open source software. He is an administrator for a free shell service for developers and with this shell service he uses Debian on the server. Now I offered up my Sun Enterprise 220r as another server for the service to use for users who wanted to play on some Sun hardware. Now it started out that I used Ubuntu on that and though Andrew A. never explicitly asked that I use Debian, he hinted at it because Debian has the “free, open source” philosophy. Long story short, I’m now running Debian on that server.

As for a weird CS hang up for me… I’m zealous about writing concurrent code only in functional or concurrent oriented languages. I refuse to write code that even attempts to be concurrent in anything like C/C++/Java. When I took a course last semester for C & UNIX programming, one of our assignments included fork()/pthreads. It took all my might to make myself write this program in order to fulfill the requirements for the labs. Even at my current job as a research assistant, in order to avoid writing multi-threaded code in Java I converted an ecology computer model into Erlang in order to work with the threading in Erlang instead of Java which turned out to be a fairly large project.

I don’t know what it is, maybe just the pure ugliness of multi-threaded/multi-proc code in imperative or object oriented languages that creates a mental block for me to write that kind of code in languages like Java or C/C++. Note that I’ll write in those languages, just not with concurrency.