Microsoft Office 12 will feature a new interface called the ribbon. I’m not usually a fan of Microsoft interfaces, but this one shows some potential. Office’s hierarchical menus are definitely overloaded, and “Task Panes” are clunky. Moving controls that were formally buried in modal dialogs out into the ribbon should also make working with the interface faster. My only worry here is accessibility: plain menus and dialogs are very easy to access via the keyboard. Looking at screenshots of the ribbon makes me think using it with a keyboard would be awkward.

So it turns out that nearly every binary search algorithm is broken. Why? Fixed-sized integers, a holdover from machine programming that still lingers in supposedly modern languages like Java. LtU’ers are haggling to decide if it’s a type error, a bad data structure, a language defect, a failure of correctness proofs, or just a bug. Lispers are talking smugly about their automatic fixnum-to-bignum conversion.

Of course, even Common Lisp arbitrarily limits the size of arrays. On my 64-bit SBCL, it’s a little over one quintillion, or (assuming one-byte array elements) one exabyte. That’s a bigger array than even Google is likely to need in the near future. But I think it’s valid to ask why code should be limited by anything except the hardware it’s running on.

So here’s my take on the whole issue: Yes, Java/C++/C suck. But a mathmatically perfect computer will never be built. Every premature optimization is just a concession to the reality of chips and electrons. Computer Science likes to believe it’s pure Mathematics, but Engineering will always be there to keep it humble. Double-check those proofs, and then start running tests.