computer science

Lucid has hosted multiple programming competitions and is about to host our biggest one yet in March—Code Kerfuffle—with $50,000 in prizes. Here are some things I’ve learned from helping plan and run Lucid’s programming competitions. 1. Define your purpose The first thing to keep in mind when planning competitions is…

The dangers of garbage-collected languages Any programmer that has had to manually manage memory knows the value of automatic memory management, also known as garbage collection. Garbage collection prevents several potential bugs that occur in manually managed memory, such as dangling pointers, double free errors, and several types of memory…

Uglier than a Windows backslash, odder than ===, more common than PHP, more unfortunate than CORS, more disappointing than Java generics, more inconsistent than XMLHttpRequest, more confusing than a C preprocessor, flakier than MongoDB, and more regrettable than UTF-16, the worst mistake in computer science was introduced in 1965. I…