Ted Leung’s notes on the JVM Language Summit, Dynamic Language Summit and Lang.NET. Great reading for those interested in what makes programming languages tick.
I made that
LOST in-joke
Saturday, April 18, 2009
DUDE. Other phrases of common occurrence in LOST. (Via Heilemann.)
Your Friday Jam
Friday, April 17, 2009
Here is your Friday Jam: The De La Soul Dugout. Quite good. See also: WEFUNK radio.
A console for any Ruby project
Friday, April 17, 2009
I’ve been finding this little snippet extremely useful lately:
$ irb -Ilib -rmy_libraryIf your Ruby app or library follows the idiom of requiring all the files for your app in a file named after the library, this will load everything up. If you’re being clever, you may need to invoke said cleverness before you can really get started poking around.
Anyone doing something similar?
John Mayer, closet software developer
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
“The idea is to run as many concurrent streams of production as we can.” - Is John Mayer recording an album or bootstrapping an indie app?
More harmful than harmful
Monday, April 13, 2009
We are lucky to live in a time when 99.9% of programmers will never have a legitimate argument for using GOTO (hi kernel programmers!). But in case you’re feeling nostalgic and/or ornery, there’s always COMEFROM. You can even implement it in Ruby via callcc!
Elevating the art of language implementation
Monday, April 13, 2009
Suppose we can take the following statement as true:
Whether you use it or not, the state of the programming craft has been elevated by many of the ideas bundled in Ruby on Rails.
ActiveRecord in particular brought many ideas that made it easier for more people to program with a database. Whereas before most people thought in terms of mappings or extracting data from hashes, AR gave a more fluent and object-like notation to work with. Thus, more interesting applications were born.
Right now, good VM technology is limited to Sun and Microsoft, while Apple, Google and Mozilla are re-inventing it for their web browsers. Open source languages, mostly, lack this VM technology.
ActiveRecord improved the state of the programming craft by spreading ideas that make working with a database easier. Could a similar improvement in the programming craft be realized by diffusing the knowledge of how to implement a good VM through a library? Is this a worthwhile aspiration?
Postmodern comedy gold
Monday, April 13, 2009
The Nietzsche Family Circus - random Nietzsche quote + vintage comics = comedy gold.
When technical discussions get intense
Sunday, April 5, 2009
Pro-tip: trying to unwind contentious technical discussions is a losing game. There are really multiple things going on: people discussing trade-offs in absolutes, personal vendettas being aired, missing tact filters and turf protection. If you’re lucky, there’s also some useful information hidden in the turd tossing.
Solution: don’t read too deeply, go do something useful instead.
Bonus tip: talking it out, face to face, over good drinks in a nice environment is “something useful”.
Think
Monday, March 30, 2009
The scene in The Blues Brothers where they are recruiting Matt “Guitar” Murphy is quite possibly my favorite of the movie. From the start of “Think” to the first “Freedom!” chorus, I get all sorts of musical tingles. I highly recommend it, if you have the means.
Since I can’t link to any video of the scene, why not listen to “Freedom” by Charles Mingus. It’s goodness.