Mike Schaeffer's Blog

I'm writing some content for a future post on the offshoring of jobs overseas, but I want to clear something up before it gets posted: Outsourcing and offshoring are two different and orthogonal concepts. This seems to be something that gets misunderstood a great deal, but simply put, outsourcing is the movement of jobs to a different company and offshoring is the movement of jobs to a different country. Either one can be done without the other.

The scenarios that people tend to get upset about (at least in the United States) are the scenarios involving offshoring, the movement of work overseas. Outsourcing, however, does not necessarily imply that the work gets moved to a different country: it's very common for work to be outsourced to another American business employing American workers. An example of this is hiring a Madison Avenue firm to put together an ad campaign. Sure, it'd be possible to develop the talent in house to do this yourself, but there are many advantages in outsourcing the work to a more specialized vendor.

It never ceases to amaze me how much good material there is online. Here's some more:

• Olin Shiver's History of the T implemenatation of the Scheme programming language.
• Aubrey Jaffer has some interesting material on interpreter performance issues at his SCM site.
• Alan Kay's Early History of Smalltalk
• In 1994, Richard Stallman started a debate (flamewar?) on comp.lang.tcl with a post entitled Why you should not use Tcl. The Guile scripting language was the logical outgrowth of this.
• Kent Pitman has posted a bunch of his writings relating to Lisp and SCheme. Among other things, he edited the Common Lisp Hyperspec, which is an on-line version of the Common Lisp specification.
• Peter Siebel has written a book, Practical Common Lisp, and has gotten permission to put it online indefinately.

PS: Be sure to check out Olin Shiver's philosophy of undergraduate advising. It's an example to be followed. ;-)

I'm in the middle of developing a Scheme compiler for a future release of vCalc. While I've been developing the code, I've peppered it full of debugging print statements that look something like this:

(format #t "compiling ~l, tail?=~l, value?=~l" form tail? value?)

with the output statements in place, the compiler takes about 250-300ms to compile relatively small functions. Not great, particularly considering that there's no optimization being done at all. Anyway, on a hunch I removed the format statements, and execution time improved by a couple orders of magnitude to a millisecond or two per function. That's a lot closer to what I was hoping for at this stage of development.

On the other hand, I hadn't realized that my (ad hoc, slapped together in an hour) format function was running quite that slowly. I think it'll end up being an interesting optimnization problem sooner or later.

Another useful blog from Microsoft. Michael Kaplan has been blogging for quite some time on internationalization and other Unicode-related issues. His blog full of deep, technical information on a part of Windows that seems to get overlooked a lot. I've been starting the very first steps of getting vCalc (and my Scheme interpreter) to be Unicode aware, so his blog has been timely reading.

I've also found, via Lambda the Ultimate, a website dedicated to Alexander Stepanov's papers and code. Stepanov is one of the principals behind the C++ STL (STepanov and Lee) Standard Template Library.