Saturday, October 11, 2008

Problem is elsewhere...

....Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve Chairman. Greenspan says the world is facing “the type of wrenching financial crisis that comes along only once in a century,” but, reports the New York Times, "his faith in derivatives remains unshaken." Greenspan believes that the problem is not with derivatives, but that the people using them got greedy, according to the Times.

This is quite a view. Is it a surprise to Alan Greenspan that the people on Wall Street -- said to be ruled only by the opposing instincts of greed and fear -- "got greedy?"


by Ralph Nader in a recent CounterPunch article.

Sunday, October 5, 2008

C++

C++ was my first programming language. Kind of liked it, mainly because it was the first one I learned. It was somewhat like diving into the deep end of the pool to learn swimming.

Used to think that I did have a decent understanding of the language. Not anymore. The language has evolved a lot, and am badly out of touch after becoming a full-time Java programmer. Not sure if I can continue to have it in my resume. Especially after realizing that I could not answer most of the questions in the GOTW.

Then a few interviews happened. Talked to some people who claimed to be very good at C++. Most of them were surprised to know that "struct"s can contain methods. Or why a copy constructor should take a reference.

That was a real confidence booster, personally.

Any openings for a born-again C++ programmer?

Haskell...

Trying to learn Haskell...

Don't know if anything useful can come out of this intellectual exercise. Many a year back I came across a comment in a piece of PERL code I was maintaining that it was much easier to accomplish the same thing in a functional language like Haskell. That piece of code is no longer maintained, but the urge to figure out for myself if the claim is valid still remains.

Learning Haskell on a Sunday evening. Hmmm...

Am not a geek, not even trying to appear like a geek. :-)

Economics...

Economics is an interesting field. Nobody seems to understand it, neither the practitioners nor the outsiders. And naturally I do not understand it either.

According to Scott Adams people with formal training in Economics or any of the related fields have a propensity to (over-)use the phrase "on the other hand", and they are also relatively immune to cognitive dissonance. Whatever that may be, economics is still very much like astrology.

Mind you, I am prone to cognitive dissonance myself :-)

Sometimes....

Sometimes I feel that I am a complete idiot...

But after a while I realize that I am not perfect yet, and "...some parts are still missing".

It should not deter me from trying, though.