はてなブックマーク

A discussion of the evolution of the database industry over the last half century, and why the relational database concepts introduced by E. F. Codd have proven so resilient over several decades. E.F. Codd’s “A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks”10 is one of the most influential papers in all of computer science. In it, Codd defined concepts that are still in widespread use today

Code-completion systems offering suggestions to a developer in their integrated development environment (IDE) have become the most frequently used kind of programmer assistance.1 When generating whole snippets of code, they typically use a large language model (LLM) to predict what the user might type next (the completion) from the context of what they are working on at the moment (the prompt).2 T

The dashed box on the left contains exactly the same information as the awkward textual description in the dashed box on the right. But if a developer only received one of the two to create an SQL database, they are likely to find the diagram easier than the text. We say that the text here has a higher extraneous cognitive load. When faced with a task that seems beyond a person’s abilities, it is

FoundationDB is an open-source transactional key-value store created more than 10 years ago. It is one of the first systems to combine the flexibility and scalability of NoSQL architectures with the power of ACID transactions. FoundationDB adopts an unbundled architecture that decouples an in-memory transaction management system, a distributed storage system, and a built-in distributed configurati

Deep learning (DL) has arrived, not only for natural language, speech, and image processing but also for coding, which I refer to as deep programming (DP). DP is used to detect similar programs, find relevant code, translate programs from one language to another, discover software defects, and to synthesize programs from a natural language description. The advent of large transformer language mode

The end of classical computer science is coming, and most of us are dinosaurs waiting for the meteor to hit. I came of age in the 1980s, programming personal computers such as the Commodore VIC-20 and Apple ][e at home. Going on to study computer science (CS) in college and ultimately getting a Ph.D. at Berkeley, the bulk of my professional training was rooted in what I will call “classical” CS: p

Tech companies are often criticized for a lack of diversity in their engineering workforce. In recent years, such companies have improved engineering workforce diversity through hiring and retention efforts, according to publicly available diversity reports.a However, we know little about the day-to-day, on-the-job experiences of traditionally underrepresented engineers once they join an organizat

Go is a programming language created at Google in late 2007 and released as open source in November 2009. Since then, it has operated as a public project, with contributions from thousands of individuals and dozens of companies. Go has become a popular language for building cloud infrastructure: Docker, a Linux container manager, and Kubernetes, a container deployment system, are core cloud techno

How can neural networks learn the rich internal representations required for difficult tasks such as recognizing objects or understanding language? Yoshua Bengio, Yann LeCun, and Geoffrey Hinton are recipients of the 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award for breakthroughs that have made deep neural networks a critical component of computing. Research on artificial neural networks was motivated by the observa

Key InsightsRust is the first industry-supported programming language to overcome the longstanding trade-off between the safety guarantees of higher-level languages and the control over resource management provided by lower-level systems programming languages.It tackles this challenge using a strong type system based on the ideas of ownership and borrowing, which statically prohibits the mutation

CACM Web Account Membership in ACM includes a subscription to Communications of the ACM (CACM), the computing industry's most trusted source for staying connected to the world of advanced computing. Sign In Sign Up Despite their massive size, successful deep artificial neural networks can exhibit a remarkably small gap between training and test performance. Conventional wisdom attributes small gen

CACM Web Account Membership in ACM includes a subscription to Communications of the ACM (CACM), the computing industry's most trusted source for staying connected to the world of advanced computing. Sign In Sign Up When I joined Amazon in 1998, the company had a single U.S.-based website selling only books and running a monolithic C application on five servers, a handful of Berkeley DBs for key/va

Key InsightsData was considered a material object, tied to bits, with no semantics per se. Knowledge was traditionally conceived as the immaterial object, living only in people’s minds and language. The destinies of data and knowledge became bound together, becoming almost inseparable, by the emergence of digital computing in the mid-20th century.Knowledge Graphs can be considered the coming of ag

The Pascal programming language creator Niklaus Wirth reflects on its origin, spread, and further development. In the early 1960s, the languages Fortran (John Backus, IBM) for scientific, and Cobol (Jean Sammet, IBM, and DoD) for commercial applications dominated. Programs were written on paper, then punched on cards, and one waited a day for the results. Programming languages were recognized as e

CACM Web Account Membership in ACM includes a subscription to Communications of the ACM (CACM), the computing industry's most trusted source for staying connected to the world of advanced computing. Sign In Sign Up Google has published two books about Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) principles, best practices, and practical applications.1,2 In the heat of the moment when handling a production i

Static analysis tools are programs that examine, and attempt to draw conclusions about, the source of other programs without running them. At Facebook, we have been investing in advanced static analysis tools that employ reasoning techniques similar to those from program verification. The tools we describe in this article (Infer and Zoncolan) target issues related to crashes and to the security of

A fundamental technique in reasoning about programs is the use of logical assertions to describe properties of program states. Turing used assertions to argue about the correctness of a particular program in 1949,40 and they were incorporated into general formal systems for program proving starting with the work of Floyd21 and Hoare22 in the 1960s. Hoare logic, which separation logic builds upon,

Lua is a scripting language developed at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio) that has come to be the leading scripting language for video games worldwide.3,7 It is also used extensively in embedded devices like set-top boxes and TVs and in other applications like Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and Wikipedia.14 Its first version was released in 1993. The current version, Lua 5

In the ideal world, software developers would analyze each problem in the language of its domain and then articulate solutions in matching terms. They could thus easily communicate with domain experts and separate problem-specific ideas from the details of general-purpose languages and specific program design decisions. Back to Top Key InsightsLanguage-oriented programming is an emerging software-

CACM Web Account Membership in ACM includes a subscription to Communications of the ACM (CACM), the computing industry's most trusted source for staying connected to the world of advanced computing. Sign In Sign Up What is the effect of programming languages on software quality? This question has been a topic of much debate for a very long time. In this study, we gather a very large data set from

The traditional wisdom for designing database schemas is to use a design tool (typically based on a UML or ER model) to construct an initial data model for one’s data. When one is satisfied with the result, the tool will automatically construct a collection of 3rd normal form relations for the model.  Then, applications are coded against this relational schema.  When business circumstances change

This open source computing framework unifies streaming, batch, and interactive big data workloads to unlock new applications. Analyses performed using Spark of brain activity in a larval zebrafish: embedding dynamics of whole-brain activity into lower-dimensional trajectories. The growth of data volumes in industry and research poses tremendous opportunities, as well as tremendous computational ch

Early Google employees decided to work with a shared codebase managed through a centralized source control system. This approach has served Google well for more than 16 years, and today the vast majority of Google’s software assets continues to be stored in a single, shared repository. Meanwhile, the number of Google software developers has steadily increased, and the size of the Google codebase h

MINIX's longtime mascot is a raccoon, chosen because it is agile, smart, usually friendly, and eats bugs. While Linux is well known, its direct ancestor, MINIX, is now 30 and still quite spry for such aged software. Its story and how it and Linux got started is not well known, and there are perhaps some lessons to be learned from MINIX’s development. Some of these lessons are specific to operating

How apps like Inkl and SmartNews are overcoming the challenges of aggregation to win over content publishers and users alike. Inkl CEO Gautam Mishra describes his company's news app as the "Spotify of news." News aggregators are services that pull together online content in one place for ease of viewing on mobile devices. Until recently, the market for news aggregator apps has been dominated by Go

The earliest computers, like the ENIAC, were rare and heroically difficult to program. That difficulty stemmed from the requirement that algorithms be expressed in a “vocabulary” suited to the particular hardware available, ranging from function tables for the ENIAC to more conventional arithmetic and movement operations on later machines. Introduction of symbolic programming languages, exemplifie