Speaking My Mind

It is well documented that people’s #1 fear is speaking in public ! Effective and efficient public speaking is a whole topic in its own right; but a few simple tips might help to both improve your effectiveness and help to reduce the anxiety. You may be called on to talk about your work at very short notice; or you may have a week’s notice; and you may be required to give a formal slide show or just a brief verbal update. Many, if not most of the issues, are the same. The Hook Newspaper editors call the first paragraph of an article ‘the hook’. Its meant to hook you into reading the rest of the piece. On the other hand, the classical ‘say what you are going to say, say it, and say what you said’ approach gives people plenty of time to switch off. The hook may be playful, it may be controversial, but it must communicate why the listener should pay attention. The Line Its a conversation! Even if no one says anything they are listening and thinking; and maybe replying to you in their head...

It is easy to be confused by the term domain specific language. It sounds like a fancy term for jargon. It is often interpreted to mean some form of specialized language. I would like to explore another role for them: as vehicles for policy statements . In mathematics there are many examples of instances where it is easier to attack a problem by solving a more general, more uniform, problem and then specializing the result to get the desired answer. It is very similar in programming: most programs take the form of a general mechanism paired with a policy that controls the machine. Taken seriously, you can see this effect down to the smallest example: fact(n) where n>0 is n*fact(n-1); fact(0) is 1 is a general machine for computing factorial; and the expression: fact(10) is a policy 'assertion' that specifies which particular use of the factorial machine is intended. One important aspect of policies is that they need to be intelligible to the owner of the machine: unlike the...