The other week I was working on my compilers homework – the semantic analysis part is an object-oriented nightmare. Something called the visitor pattern to traverse trees and do weird stuff. It made me want to curl up in a fetal position in the corner, rocking back and forth in a padded room, while mumbling [...]

Image via Wikipedia Sometimes we’re given a stupid algorithm or two to implement at this or that course at uni. This time ’round they wanted us to implement something called external matrix transposition … the idea is that you have to transpose a matrix live from the hard drive because it is potentially so bloody [...]