Cool Book on Evolutionary Optimization and Friends

Sean Luke, a CS professor at George Mason, has made available a free book on stochastic optimization algorithms called Essentials of Metaheuristics. It looks like a really good introduction to the subject, which is, of course, a damn cool subject.

Searching for the NSX of programming languages

Programming.reddit.com had a discussion about an interesting analysis of how languages relate as far as speed versus code size. The analysis is based on data from The Computer Language Benchmarks Game, which takes submissions of programs in different languages to loosely compare the performances of the languages.

Both the blog article and the reddit discussion are worth reading. The reddit page includes posts by both the author of the article, gmarceau, and the one of the Benchmarks Game's maintainers, iguoy.