In the last several years, I discovered some coding techniques that I find interesting. They’re a bit off the beaten track, however. When I’ve tried to explain them to people, it has proved difficult. The ideas seem too alien to our accustomed ways of thinking. But a number of people to whom I’ve presented these ideas at CppCon, or who have worked with them on real systems, have wanted me to write them up and turn them into open-source code.
Result: The Gogetter project, in C++ at github. The first step is more clarification of the ideas. I’ll use this blog for some necessary and clarifying ruminations.
I am blessed to have some possible collaborators on this effort, and the blog will serve as a vehicle for communication and documentation of team efforts as well.
I’m interested in lots of other things, but this blog will confine itself to programming-related interests, especially in C++. I am fascinated by the psychology and logic of code/coding and the trade-offs among programming paradigms. I’m also interested in programming cultures and communities.
I’ve got disqus working here so you can comment. Or you can DM me on Twitter, where I go by @normed_space. I would love to hear from you.
My name is Norman Birkett. I go by ‘Norm’ and ‘Norman’ about equally. First learned to program around 1973, age ten. Have done it professionally since 1984, minus one decade when I was a schoolteacher. So in the programming world I’m an old-timer. My training is primarily in analytic philosophy, and some of my programming interests arise from wanting to share the usefulness of analytic-philosophical ways of thinking for software development. For example, I think of all kinds of interfaces as formal languages, and this turns out to be very powerful.
I’ve mostly worked on financial systems (fixed-income and FX trading and decision support, trade processing and accounting, etc.), but also spent some time on DBMS internals. I’m really into data analysis and data structure design. Love that data. The main languages I’ve used professionally are C++, C, Fortran 77, SQL, Fortran II, DIBOL and COBOL, plus all the usual shells and special-purpose languages.
Also, I’m from Canada, so I pronounce the title of this page in a way that Americans can find amusing, especially after I’ve been back to the Great White North to get my accent batteries recharged.
I am grateful to Borislov Stanimirov for encouragement to create a blog on github, and to various people who have tried to make it easy to do this. I’ve settled on the Hyde theme built atop Poole, both due to Mark Otto.
There are many things I want to add to this blog or improve about it. For example,
I’m not pleased with the syntax highlighter I’m using, as it parses too much of C++ as a ‘name’. So I’ll look into improving that at some point.
I plan to add a resources & links page for C++ and also for philosophical/mathematical logic.
Once I have a few more posts, I’ll add some sort of site map or other navigation aid.