Software Engineering discussion

Beautiful FORTRAN? I think so. The point about the AB matrix format, which allows for both condensed matrix input and in-place memory consumption reminded me of the implementation of the AES cipher. The cipher alogrithm also operates on the input matrix in-place to gradually morph it from ciphertext to plaintext or visa-versa.

As an aside, this past month I have been doing a fair amount of iPad programming in Objective-C, and many of these old-school resource-saving techniques are back in vogue when dealing with the limitations of mobile platforms!

I liked this chapter, because it was about Linear algebra. It seemed less code intense and more discussion based than the previous chapter, which is fine.

It had been a few chapters since the book discussed what "beautiful" means as directly as this chapter. This chapter could have gone near the beginning of the book, but the previous chapter was needed to act as a linear algebra refresher. Putting this chapter in the middle of the book made a nice refresher about being "beautiful".

It seems the book is doing this with a few different topics. One chapter gives the topic introduction. The following chapter continues the discussion without the introduction. The bioinformatics had two chapters with this format too.