casualcoder - Developer IT

Greenspun's Tenth Rule, does every large project include a Lisp interpreter?

- by casualcoder

Greenspun's tenth rule (actually the only rule) states that: Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp. My memory is that there are some papers on the topic, perhaps for Borland's Quattro (spreadsheet) project and possibly others. Google is unhelpful, maybe the right search terms are not coming to mind. I am looking for papers or articles supporting this claim, if any.

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Using SSD as disk cache

- by casualcoder

Is there software for Linux to use an SSD as disk cache? I believe that Sun does something like this with ZFS, though not sure. A quick search provides nothing suitable. The goal would be to put frequently requested files on the SSD on-the-fly. Since the SSD has more capacity than RAM for less money and better performance than hard disk, this should provide an efficient performance boost.

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Vim with split frame of buffers or file listing

- by casualcoder

Similar in appearance to Vim as a note taking platform (SO), I would like a pane with a list of open buffers that can be used as a jump to list. This is one feature in many IDEs and other advanced editors that is missing. Having a dozen buffers or so open becomes confusing as to which buffer is where.

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Multiple branch merges, stick with Subversion or move to Mercurial or Git?

- by casualcoder

Given a situation where there are three branches, A, B and C, where A is merged to both B and C on a regular basis. From time to time B is merged to C. With Subversion, B apparently must be removed and recreated after every merge to C. This raises groans from colleagues, but would any alternative do any better? It would seem to me that Mercurial would not. Perhaps Git? Does anyone else run into this problem?

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