corollary

Entry #99

Listening to:

Mahler, symphony #2 Resurrection.

Here's an interesting interview with Brian Kernighan. Brian Kernighan is famous for being one of the authors of the first book on the C programming language. (The other was Dennis Ritchie, the inventor of the language, so the book is often just known as K&R.)

I've recently found the home-page of James Gleick, who wrote quite an appealing popular science book about chaos theory and the people behind it. He's good on the experience of being a beta tester for an early version Microsoft Word, but I don't think much of his piece on the Ariane 5 crash, which ends with the feeble line:

Fortunately, he points out, really important software has a reliability of 99.9999999 percent. At least, until it doesn't.