Andrew Kuchling:
Explaining things: math vs programming
["Years ago I tried to translate TeX's line-breaking algorithm into Python code. In Knuth's Computers and Typesetting, the algorithm is given in a Pascalish language. Some functions did lots of pointer shuffling that would be have been straightforward to translate into C, but to write Python code I had to actually disentangle the linked-list surgery to figure out whether it was list.append(x) or list.insert(0, x) or whatever."]
In the arena that night, the whole last minute was drowned out by cheers — and then when the soaring music swelled, the confetti rained down as the harbinger of balloons and the hopeful first family took the stage, forget about it — it was a perfect end to a convention that last Monday, no one even knew if it would happen. But it did, and I'm so glad to have been there.
AP - Flanked by officials from the NAACP and the Southern Poverty Law Center, FBI Director Robert Mueller last year announced with considerable fanfare a new partnership between his agency and civil rights organizations.
