Homepage of Simon Lang

I was a member of the HADES collaboration from August 2003 till Febuary 2008. My main project was the analysis of electron pair production in the system Ar+KCl @ 1.76 AGeV, measured in September 2005.

Software Engineering Corner

Concerning software engenieering, these are smoe of my favorite links:

$ The Art of Unix Programming: This book written by Eric Steven Raymond describes what a programmer can learn from the philosophy, history, design, implementation and user community of the UNIX operating system by presenting some simple rules. A must for every UNIX system or application programmer or for a guy who want to go beyond the basics of computer programming. $ Programming Wisdom Center: A refreshing look at software development, especially on object oriented techniques. This web site shows, that it's worth to think critically about approaches where OOP is declared to be almost always the best paradigm for designing a new application. $ Programming paradigms: ... and if you are searching for alternatives to OOP, you should first try to get an overview of what's available on the market; and this Wikipedia article is a nice attempt to list the different programming paradigms. See how many of them exist (and still this list is not yet complete!), and wonder how sparse most of them are used throughout our community, today. $ Methodology in Software Engineering: Well, if you have choosen your programming pradigms, its time to think about the methodology to implement them. This article is a brief introduction and entry point to this subject. $ The Mythical Man-Month - Essays on Software Engineering: ... is a book on software project management by Fred Brooks, whose central theme is that "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later." The work was first published in 1975, and still we make the same mistakes mentioned in this book! $ No Silver Bullet - Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering: ... is a well-known paper on software engineering written by Fred Brooks in 1986. Brooks argues that there will be no more technologies or practices that will serve as "silver bullets" and create a 10-fold improvement in programmer productivity over 10 years. $ Why Do Universities Fail Teaching Software Engineering?: ... the answer is given in the article. For me it hits the mark! Is also describes the sources of problems a young scientist usually encounters while trying to use software developed by other scientists or while reflecting his own work. $ Physics Software Rant: A real live example, showing the problems with a well known physics software package.

-- SimonLang - 18 Feb 2008