It’s hard to link people across so many thousands of kilometres, so you have to sort of dig deep sometimes to find
those common threads, and I think (it’s) maybe facial hair. Perhaps in the beginning it was a response to the elements,
but certainly over time, a fashion statement is one of the unifying themes in Canadian culture.
I mean, Brian Blessed… Richard Stallman… these guys, whoever they are… Maybe I should grow a beard. Throw
in peace and harmony and I’m sold.
Got in last night. I was giving Holly a ride so I decided to take off early. Unfortunately, I forgot that I promised I’d
also give Eric and Alex a ride. Oops. I was just passing under the 427 when I got Eric’s call asking when I could pick
them up. They were able to catch a ride into town later, though, so that worked out okay. Which is good, since I’m
staying in their room.
Friday night was mostly just hanging out. I ran into some surprising people. Today I’ll probably sit in on some readings
and things.
Notes
I’ve signed Eric and myself up for the D&D 4e game tonight, so I’ll finally get to try that out. I haven’t played D&D in ages. I’ll let you know how it goes.
Tamora Pierce gives a shout-out to Sventlana Chmakova. Wishes she’d write more Dramacon. 😄
Good creative writing panel about overcoming creative blocks and distractions. I’m finding that stuff relevant to coding stuff as well.
Was hoping to sit down for a game of D&D 4e (was going to play a cat girl avenger). A medical emergency prevented that from happening. Looks like everyone’s probably okay, but we were a bit shaken by it all.
[[wiki:Barbara Liskov]] is a pioneering computer scientist and winner of the ACM Turing Award for 2008. She’s currently
head of the Programming Methodology Group in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab.
Back in the 70s, she designed a programming language
called [[wiki:CLU (programming language)|CLU]], which established fundamental concepts about data abstraction that
influence every object-oriented programming language (which, honestly, means pretty much every programming language–you
heard me, Lisp weenies) being used today. Ruby, C++, C#, Java… they were all built on her work.
Let q(x) be a property provable about objects x of type T. Then q(y) should be true for objects y of type S where S is
a subtype of T.
Put another way (and you probably need to know a little bit about object-oriented design to appreciate this), subtypes
must always be able to be substituted for a supertype. Programmers mess this up all the time, and it makes for god-awful
messes in code, which is why we need Barbara Liskov to set us straight.
![[Barbara Liskov]](/img/_MYSiMojBc-404.webp)