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My experience learning Lisp and coding a few serious programs in it was deeply profound. Afterward, most of the other languages I had been using regularly seemed silly and inane. I found myself saying things like, “I’ve spent an hour on this method, and I know I could knock it off in three lines of perfectly elegant Lisp!” And what I was lacking in those languages was a whole host of programming constructs I had either never heard of or only dimly understood before learning Lisp. Passing a function into a function? Why would you ever want to do that! You wouldn’t. Unless you got seriously into Lisp, in which case you find yourself (a) doing it all the time and (b) writing much more elegant, expressive code as a result. Same goes for closures, continuations, anonymous functions, and macros.
I’ve spent the last week or so writing in Ruby. It’s a wonderful language. It’s a joy to program in it, and I’m almost always trying to find ways to overcome the various reasons not to (”that’s not the language of the project,” “there aren’t enough libraries,” etc.). I know it like the back of my hand, and I teach the language every year. It even has a number of Lispy constructs (like closures, continuations, and anonymous functions). But it ain’t no Lisp.
But last week, I was writing proof-of-concept code. There was no one telling me what language to use, no “audience” for the code, and there were good, serviceable libraries available for Common Lisp, Ruby, Java, Python and Perl. I went with Ruby.
The question, of course, is why not write it in The Greatest Language Ever?
Well, that’s a separate rant, which I’ll save for another post.
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It is made of wax, is barely three inches across and comes in any colour you like, as long as it's black. And it could save more greenhouse gas emissions than taxes on gas guzzling cars, low energy light bulbs and wind turbines on houses combined. It is the e-cube, and it is coming soon to a fridge near you.
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I discovered that, using Performancing, I could set the title of a Blog entry, which formatted very nicely (IMHO). However, if I posted from Blogger, I could not set the title ( and so used h2 headers instead), and if I editted a Performancing entry in Blogger I lsot the title!
However, just go to Bloggers Settings -> Formatting and show the title. Now I have no excuse not to make these 2 types of entry look the same.
Well, I haven't posted much recently. Partly that is due to a new job, but also the fact that BlogThis! didn't work with the new version of Blogger. Well, now the Google Toolbar does the trick..... except that using Firefox on my Windows laptop, I can't login to Blogger. The login window goes into some sort of loop.
I have (somewhat reluctantly) got it all working in IE7, but it is not my environment of choice.....
I can use the Emacs client, mentioned earlier - but so far I have only installed that in Linux, where such things are very easy. The Ubuntu apt-get is just great!!
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And you can do stuff with Calendar and Reader too - in fact I found the HTML provided for the list of current items is a really nice way to read outstanding items.
Note to self: Installs go better if you check you have the pre-reqs rather than (mis-)remembering.
One of the key messages we are trying to highlight during our talk is the importance of mapping the captured data to a model that is suited to answering the questions you are interested in. This model can be a graph, a process or any other abstract representation of your system.
Today is National Gorilla Suit Day, inaugurated by Mad Magazine's Don Martin. "Every National Gorilla Suit Day, people of all shapes and colors around the world get their gorilla suits out of the closet, put them on and go door-to-door."
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Potholes and road defects are more than just a nuisance, they’re a danger to cyclists. They’re responsible for 12% of compensation claims by CTC members, and local Councils have a duty to fix them.
Councils can’t be everywhere, and if they don’t know about a pothole, they can’t fill it in. So if you want to get it repaired, you have to report it. Fillthathole.org.uk contacts the right people for you, to get the roads repaired quickly and easily. So you can spend your time riding, not dodging obstacles.
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Scrybe™ a groundbreaking online organizer that caters to today´s lifestyle in a cohesive and intuitive way.
Looks interesting - flexible lists and diary, but the "thought-stream" idea looks ver y useful. I've signed up for a beta......
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Microsoft has hired Donald Ferguson away from IBM, where he was chief architect of IBM Software Group and a big thinker on Web services and service-oriented architectures.
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Knuth’s Tex for the Math-kings of sigma, and pi,
Unix vim for the Server-lords with their O’Reilly tomes,
Word for Mortal Men doomed to die,
Emacs from the Bearded One on his Gnu throne,
In the land of Stallman where free software lies.
One Emacs to rule them all. One Emacs to find them,
One Emacs to take commands and to the keystrokes bind them,
In the land of Stallman, where free software lies.
From Phil Windley:
"If you use BibTeX for managing paper references (and after all, who doesn’t) and you use a Mac, then you should know about BibDesk, an open source tool for managing BibTeX bibliography files."
Well I don't have Mac OS X ( gasp!) so I went looking for Linux alternatives and came up with KBibtex. Debian and Ubuntu folks can get it via here. Looks good, but I will report back later after more use.
| An excellent Lessig talk | |
Great, fun, insightful stuff from Giles Bowkett:
If there's anything godlike about using Lisp or Smalltalk when the rest of the world is on Java and C#, it isn't the skill level required. It's the balls. Standing up to the rest of the world and telling them, "your technology decisions are bad and I'm going to use a language that doesn't suck" is a very unusual move. It requires a lot of courage. But if you think about that, that's kind of bad. I mean, if what I'm saying is true, then the average technology business is kind of pathetic.
Unfortunately, I've worked for a very large number of different technology businesses, and I can tell you with confidence, certainty, and no fear of inaccuracy that the average technology business is indeed kind of pathetic.
It's worth pointing out, the poster children for Lisp and Smalltalk are Paul Graham and Avi Bryant. Neither one of these guys actually had to stand up to management and tell them they were wrong. They just went ahead and started companies using better technology. Paul Graham obviously won pretty big when he did that. It's too early to tell with Avi Bryant, but there's no doubt at all that Dabble puts every other Web app in the world to shame.My emphasis added.
Times Online: I'm not a saint, just a parent
Right now I can't say much about this - my own memories come flooding back
GoboLinux is a modular Linux distribution: it organizes the programs in your system in a new, logical way. Instead of having parts of a program thrown at /usr/bin, other parts at /etc and yet more parts thrown at /usr/share/something/or/another, each program gets its own directory tree, keeping them all neatly separated and allowing you to see everything that's installed in the system and which files belong to which programs in a simple and obvious way.
I have often felt the standard way was rather messy.
