Welcome to the second issue of The Left Fold, a weekly programming article digest.

Programming Languages

Doug Crockford gave a talk on his book "JavaScript: The Good Parts". This article explains what he likes, what he doesn't, and why:

• Doug Crockford Talk on JavaScript (news.yc, reddit)

An assessment of the current state of D implementations and libraries:

• The Present of D (reddit)

GWT, the Google Web Toolkit, compiles Java to JavaScript. Here's an article critical of the approach:

• Lost in Translation or Why GWT Isn't the Future of Web Development (reddit)

Thoughts on and predictions about the moratorium on Python changes proposed last week:

• Python on Ice (reddit)

Programming Language Implementations

Three Common Lisp implementations are evaluated and critiqued for numerical performance and code generation:

• An Evaluation of Major Lisp Compilers (news.yc, reddit)

How PyPy improved garbage collection times, and how it compares to CPython:

• PyPy GC improvements (reddit)

Coding

A survey of how several well-known C libraries and applications handle out-of-memory conditions:

• Handling out-of-memory conditions in C (reddit)

The L1 code cache, how it impacts performance, and why smaller can be better than unrolled:

• The other hidden cycle-eating demon: code cache misses (news.yc)

Design and Testing

Communications of the ACM features a retrospective by C.A.R. Hoare on testing and verification:

• Retrospective: An Axiomatic Basis for Computer Programming (reddit, LtU)

Analogies between Feynman's observations about the Challenger development process and software development:

• Richard Feynman, the Challenger Disaster, and Software Engineering (news.yc, reddit)

KLEE is an automatic test generator that uses LLVM to trace code paths and provide coverage for arbitrary C programs. Think Haskell's QuickCheck, but aware of the source code:

• KLEE: Unassisted and Automatic Generation of High-Coverage Tests for Complex Systems Programs (pdf) (reddit)

• KLEE Tutorial One: Testing a Small Function

Algorithms

CouchDB is a document-oriented database. This article describes how it uses an append-only B-Tree for replication and concurrency:

• CouchDB Implements a Fundamental Algorithm (reddit)

Everyone loves Bloom filters. This paper describes an extension that supports an unspecified maximum set size with a bounded error rate:

• Scalable Bloom Filters (pdf) (reddit)

A discussion of one of the more difficult aspects of the Netflix challenge that remains unimproved:

• Netflix Prize: Was The Napoleon Dynamite Problem Solved? (news.yc, reddit)

UI

Development and considerations for rating tea:

• Brewing a Better Rating System (reddit)

Experience Reports

Clojure for data analysis:

• Observations from a real-world Clojure project (news.yc, reddit)

Mono compared to Microsoft's .NET for an browser-based game:

• Running Mono - an Overview (reddit)

The Left Fold

Thanks for the feedback (reddit, news.yc, favorite reddit comment) on the first issue. I am slowly experimenting with different layouts and organizations. Unfortunately, I am not able to offer an RSS feed of fulltext articles (copyright).

Thanks to Adam Langley for contributing to this issue.

-- Alec