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Chris Oakman oakmac

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Make it real

Ideas are cheap. Make a prototype, sketch a CLI session, draw a wireframe. Discuss around concrete examples, not hand-waving abstractions. Don't say you did something, provide a URL that proves it.

Ship it

Nothing is real until it's being used by a real user. This doesn't mean you make a prototype in the morning and blog about it in the evening. It means you find one person you believe your product will help and try to get them to use it.

Do it with style

http://www.paulgraham.com/thist.html

That standard religion I just gave you about "stop&copy only pays for the good stuff, but in mark&sweep you have to pay for the garbage, as well"? It's not true. We all believed it for decades. But Norman Ramsey at harvard has cleverly shown that you can implement mark&sweep with exactly the same asymptotic costs as stop&copy. This is good news especially for tight-memory systems with homogenous heap data. Norman's observation is really obvious and simple; hardly an impressive result when you see it. Except, uh, that it eluded everyone else for decades. And not because people didn't care; GC has received a lot of attention from researchers. There's a lesson there.