New Job = New Posts?

I have my first real, out-of-school, full-time type job at SSAI working on embedded systems for a NASA instrument for the International Space Station. I am enjoying it a lot so far, but I've been pretty busy and haven't posted for a while.

But that may be about to change! I'm learning a lot about real-time operating systems, embedded systems programming, network protocols using in space, radiation hardened devices, and programming in C (which I will be doing a lot of). This gives me lots of new material to talk about. I also have some side projects I'm starting up that might make for some good posts.

For right now I just wanted to comment on my experience with C. In my internship this summer I started to really like Perl, despite all my programming language snobbery with Haskell. I would definitely use it for text processing and as a replacement for shell scripts. Similarly, I've been discovering the good things about C. The attitude that I have right now, which I heard somewhere and seems to be true, is that C is a very nice assembly language. What I mean is that its abstraction (its abstract machine) is a fairly thin layer above the actual machine.

While the Haskellian in me doesn't like unions types and arbitrary casting, I'm starting to see how they are useful in systems programming. Bitfields, while possibly dangerous (compiler specific behavior has already come up in the last two weeks), and helpful with network programming and other densely packet structures.

So- the future. I hope to post about embedded systems, C, space, and my (second attempt at a) project to write a standalone Forth operating system.