Salve, Orbis Terrarum!

Well, what can I say? For whatever reason, I decided to create a blog. Partially, I suppose, as a result of Steve Yegge's inspiration. I guess I basically decided that I've just got a lot of stuff going through my head here during my last year of college, and I felt like finally creating a place to write it all down. I figured I'd never actually bother with something private or see any point to continuing with it, but maybe if I'm lucky a few people will read this and enjoy it.

I'm guessing this is going to become mostly a technical blog about lots of programming topics, like Stevey's mentioned above, or Joel on Software. Being a senior majoring in Computer Science at Notre Dame, I've got a lot of ranom ideas about how to improve the lives of programmers and the people who use their software, but not much time to implement those ideas. So, I figure I'll contribute to the community discussion a bit and maybe come back to some of these ideas when I've got some more time to dedicate to a full project.

Don't expect much continuance to these articles. I plan on writing about programming languages quite a bit, especially those used for web programming, but I think most posts are just going to be about whatever ideas come into my head during class or throughout the day. Operating systems, software companies and jobs, e-mail, and who knows what else are all fair game. Probably some non-technical stuff every now and then, as well.

I guess the main thing I really wanted to say in this post is that I'm really amazed sometimes at how just writing out ones's thoughts can really help you think and create new ideas. I tend to keep everything in my head, and then half the time forget about some cool thing I was just thinking about. I need to learn to get that stuff into a bit more permanent medium more often so I can actually organize my thoughts (hence this blog). Try it sometime: when you've got some problem that you can't figure out a solution for, just grab a bunch of paper and a pen and just start writing whatever comes into your mind, stream-of-consciousness style. It really helped me figure out last week a little more of what I'm looking for in a career. I think there's something about making things more explicit by giving them a name that makes them easier to understand, and easier to deal with.

Oh, by the way: you may be wondering about the title of my blog. Lambda is in reference to lambda calculus, a mathematical system for applying functions. It's part of the core of Scheme, a very clean, minimal language that's taught at a lot of colleges. It also essentially describes how programs work at their core. Big O, then, comes from the Big O notation used to describe the complexity of an algorithm. It's a fairly complex topic, but what it comes down to is that if a process takes O(n) time, then that means it takes time proportional to the size of the input, which is the variable n. O(n^2) takes time relative to the size of the input squared, etc. This idea is fundamental to determining how efficient an algorithm is.

I decided to use these two topics as a title for a couple of reasons. First, they've both been drilled into me from day 1 of my studies as being fundamental to CS, so they're topics I've spent a lot of time working with. Second, I guess it's just the mathematician in me that is fascinated with being able to express so much in a single letter. I imagine that's just part of being a programmer, being amazed at what you can do with a new language (which is partially why programmers are always complaining about programming languages and trying to invent new ones).

Wow, so that's the first post. This whole blogging thing still seems weird to me in a variety of ways, but I guess I'll get over it. Feel free to comment, and I'll hopefully be back soon with some more thoughts.

P.S. I added the title at the last minute, so I'll add the explanation here. That's Latin for "Hello, World". Yeah, I'm a bit of a Latin geek as well. And if you don't know where Hello World comes from, you're probably in the wrong place.