Arrivals

Lots of arrivals today:

  1. My preamp arrived.
  2. Linda's new golf clubs arrived; we tried them out immediately

The clubs are very nice. They are my Christmas gift to Linda. I hope she likes them.
Next arrival was the preamp. Here's the box it came in:
And this is the preamp itself:
Here's my old record player. Still works after all these years and the sound seem OK.
And here is a screen shot of my software that captures and records the record. My new mission is to copy my vinyl to disk.

 

History of Programming Languages

O'Reilly published a chart laying out the history and relationships of various programming languages:

For 50 years, computer programmers have been writing code. New technologies continue to emerge, develop, and mature at a rapid pace. Now there are more than 2,500 documented programming languages! O'Reilly has produced a poster called History of Programming Languages (PDF: 701K), which plots over 50 programming languages on a multi-layered, color-coded timeline.

Interesting. What can one draw from this? A couple of things come to mind:

  1. Life was pretty simple in the early 60's with only a hand full of programming languages. Makes one wonder whether the complexity introduced by having multiple (and usually incompatible) languages is worth it.
  2. Lots of change. In this instance the change is incremental--it adds new things without immediate affect on current routine--and thus can quite often be easily ignored. At some point however, such incremental changes do impact and then, well, it's too late.


 

November Golf

While it may look miserable, today was warm, still, and ghostly. The balls shot off the club face and disappeared into the mist.