George Neville-Neil

Jan 13, 2025 | cacm.acm.org | George Neville-Neil |Orit Hazzan |Micah Beck

Dear KV,By now, I am sure you have seen the CrowdStrike news, and I cannot help but imagine you have opinions on what really went wrong to cause so many problems. The news, both tech and nontech, is full of explanations of what went wrong: poor testing, relying too much on one company for critical infrastructure, allowing a critical module failure to prevent further remote updates … the list goes on.

Nov 6, 2024 | cacm.acm.org | George Neville-Neil |Saurabh Bagchi |Shuchi Grover |Logan Kugler

Dear KV, A recent small project at work required me to use JavaScript, and I was surprised to find the following note in the documentation (see https://bit.ly/3Bz3hC0) for a code that sets a timeout: “Also note that if the value isn’t a number, implicit type coercion is silently done on the value to convert it to a number—which can lead to unexpected and surprising results; see Non-number delay values are silently coerced into numbers for an example.” It is commonly accepted that languages...

Aug 27, 2024 | cacm.acm.org | George Neville-Neil |Micah Beck |Shaoshan Liu |Alex Tray

Dear KV,Even though I am not in academia, I try to keep up with the research in computing science, mostly by reading the abstracts of papers in the SIGs I was a member of in college. From time to time, I find an interesting paper that contains something I can apply in my day job. Sometimes I am even lucky enough to find that the researchers have posted their code to their web page or a service like GitHub. But, more often than not, whenever I try the code, I find it has many problems.

Jul 8, 2024 | cacm.acm.org | George Neville-Neil |Alex Tray |Sam Greengard

Dear KV,In teaching an algorithms course this semester, I discovered my students had received very little instruction about how to divide their code into functions. So, I spent a weekend trolling various programming handbooks and discovered most of them are silent on this topic. I ended up writing a handbook (see https://bit.ly/4cc3TdL) to help my students, but was struck more by the advice gap.

May 8, 2024 | cacm.acm.org | George Neville-Neil |Sandrine Ceurstemont |Alex Williams |Sam Greengard

Dear KV,I have been porting some code between two related—but divergent—open source projects. The project I am porting to was forked from another project many years ago, and it seems the names of the APIs have changed and no one is tracking what is going on in the other project. This has led to APIs for exactly the same type of function having different names, even if what they do is the same.