Reflections on Trusting Trust Ken Thompson, 1984 (Turing Award Lecture) Another Turing Award lecture to close out the week, this time from Ken Thompson who asks: To what extent should one trust a statement that a program is free of Trojan horses? Perhaps it is more important to trust the people who wrote the software. … Continue reading Reflections on trusting trust
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Computer programming as an art
Computer Programming as an Art Donald Knuth, 1974 Some programs are elegant, some are exquisite, some are sparkling. My claim is that it is possible to write grand programs, noble programs, truly magnificent ones! How do you follow David Parnas, Fred Brooks, and Tony Hoare? Perhaps with a little Donald Knuth... Today's choice is Knuth's … Continue reading Computer programming as an art
The Emperor’s Old Clothes
The Emperor's Old Clothes C.A.R. Hoare, 1981 Today we'll be looking at Tony Hoare's ACM Turing Award lecture from 1980, as published in the CACM in 1981. It's another piece that had a big influence on my professional career with its emphasis on the pursuit of simplicity, the need to tame complexity and ambition, and … Continue reading The Emperor’s Old Clothes
No Silver Bullet – essence and accident in software engineering
No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accident in Software Engineering Fred Brooks, 1987 We hear desperate cries for a silver bullet - something to make software costs drop as rapidly as computer hardware costs do.... Not only are there no silver bullets now in view, the very nature of software makes it unlikely that there will … Continue reading No Silver Bullet – essence and accident in software engineering
On the criteria to be used in decomposing systems into modules
On the criteria to be used in decomposing systems into modules David L Parnas, 1971 Welcome back to a new term of The Morning Paper! I thought I'd kick things off by revisiting a few of my favourite papers from when I very first started this exercise just over two years ago. At that time … Continue reading On the criteria to be used in decomposing systems into modules
End of Term, and the power of compound interest
Schools where I live are now breaking up for summer, and it’s time for The Morning Paper summer recess too. Over the last term, we’ve covered 67 papers and a broad range of topics. InfoQ are kindly working on another “Quarterly Review” publication (see here for the previous edition). As ever it’s hard to choose … Continue reading End of Term, and the power of compound interest
Time-adaptive sketches (Ada sketches) for summarizing data streams
Time-adaptive sketches (Ada Sketches) for Summarizing Data Streams Shrivastava et al. SIGMOD 2016 More algorithm fun today, and again in the context of data streams. It’s the 3 V’s of big data, but not as you know it: Volume, Velocity, and Var… Volatility. Volatility here refers to changing patterns in the data over time, and … Continue reading Time-adaptive sketches (Ada sketches) for summarizing data streams
Range thresholding on streams
Range thresholding on streams Qiao et al. SIGMOD 2016 It’s another streaming paper today, also looking at how to efficiently handle a large volume of concurrent queries over a stream, and also claiming a significant performance breakthrough of several orders of magnitude. We’re looking at a different type of query though, known as a range … Continue reading Range thresholding on streams
Sharing-aware outlier analytics over high-volume data streams
Sharing-aware outlier analytics over high-volume data streams Cao et al. SIGMOD 2016 With yesterday’s preliminaries on skyline queries out of the way, it’s time to turn our attention to the Sharing-aware Outlier Processing (SOP) algorithm of Cao et al. The challenge that SOP addresses is that of building a stream-based outlier detection system that can … Continue reading Sharing-aware outlier analytics over high-volume data streams
Progressive skyline computation in database systems
Progressive skyline computation in database systems Papadias et al. SIGMOD 2003 I’m still working through some of the papers from SIGMOD 2016 (as some of you spotted, that was the unifying them for last week). But today I’m jumping back to 2003 to provide some context for a streaming analytics paper we’ll be looking at … Continue reading Progressive skyline computation in database systems
the morning paper 