Kurt Stephens

Data Transform Programming Style is somewhere between imperative and functional programming.

Data representations flow towards the desired result, from least expressive to most expressive. This allows greater reuse of code on multiple data representations, greater locality of intent and more literal coding. The nested nature of functional application is flattened into an imperative style that reads more like pseudo-code, while retaining functional elements.

Here is a list of packages I've developed. These are available for free, but I retain all copyrights except for software copyright by others that may be included.

• XVF: C++ Introspection by Extensible Visitation (published in ACM SIGPLAN Notices, v.38, n.8, August 2003)
  
  
  
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All papers: Copyright Kurt A. Stephens and ION, Inc., unless otherwise noted.

I like writing software components; little bits of code that can be assembled into bigger programs. UNIX fits well for me as its design philosophy is focused around combining small programs into larger systems.

I’ve compiled most of the software I’ve written into a respository. I’m interested in any questions or feedback.

I’ve been very interested in meta-programming for a while: programs that have access to information about their own construction and state and programs that synthesize other programs.

One big open-source project I’m working on is a UML meta-modeling framework written in Perl: UMMF.

My least favorite thing about computers is setting them up: installing hardware and operating systems. NeXT’s NeXTSTEP was probably my favorite operating system to work on. I’ve been running Linux since 1996. Linux has been a mixed blessing for me due to how quickly the environment and compatibilities change.

My first computer was a second-hand Apple ][ revision 1 motherboard w/ 16kb of ram (later expanded to 48kb with a 16kb language card). I learned 6502 assembler and had a lot of fun writing graphics and sound routines for silly demos and video games.

I currently have a Toshiba Libretto U105. It is the coolest!

Mark your UNIX epoch calendars: On the morning of 2034/06/16 the number of seconds since 1970/01/01 will be 2034061600.

I’ve been involved with computers since I was 10 years old. My father was an electronic engineer and I was always looking over his shoulder asking “what are you doing?”. I first thought computing was about designing logic circuits. I started designing logic circuits out of AND, OR and NOT blocks: XOR circuits, adders, etc. Later I was introduced to computer programming by a friend of my father’s who gave me a book on BASIC programming. I wrote programs before I had a computer to run them on — I would simulate the execution on my father’s electric typewriter. Born to geek!

This was part of a mail trail on the WWWAC mailing list.

I wholeheartedly recommend backups for all computers – anybody not automatically and periodically backing up important data is asking for trouble. It is the first thing I recommend to any non-technical client. In my case of my burned-up RAID 1 drives, my backups were incomplete ( my scheduled backups failed to run and I wasn’t validating them ), and the cost of reinstalling OSs, applications and data from complete backups, if I had them, was more than the cost of sending the drives out to be resurrected.

Backups are only a last resort, because no backup solution solves the problems of the cost of downtime, restoring and the possibility of incomplete, missing or non-atomic backups.

I have a T22 running Linux. For the most part, I’m pleased with performance, but the hardware reliablity and customer service has been absmal.