A few old ideas

2024-05-21 19:10 • 218 words • ~1 min read ⏲

As I reviewed my bookmarks from the weeks 20 and 21 of 2022, I noticed that a recurring motive were neat old ideas.

First I found an article by Mark Nelson about Operator precedence by textual substitution, which describes a suprisingly simple method to handle the evaluation of arithmetic expressions, that stems from the early 1960s. I once had an job interview, where I was asked about this very problem. I went down with the "convert infix to reverse-polish-notation and traverse the tree" path. I wish I had known this neat little trick then...

Tom Stuart shows in Programming with Nothing how you can take nearly everything away from a programming environment and still accomplish computations. In restrospect, this is what I would have needed in the theoretical computer science course that was my introduction to the lamdba calculus.

And as a contrast, on the other end of the spectrum, George Lungu, on his blog Excel Unusual shares cool ways of solving engineering and science problems and modeling and visualizing natural phenomena. Hundreds of spreadsheats with some very deep ideas available. Also a good reminder to never underestimate spreadsheats.

Lastly, if you are into well-hung (or battle-tested) ideas, you might enjoy the archives of Lindy Hacker News, which collects classic articles that get frequently reposted on Hacker News.