E-Scribe News : a programmer’s blog

About Me

PBX My name is Paul Bissex, and e-scribe.com is my consulting business. I build web applications using as much open source software as possible. From September to June I teach web design and other important non-photographic professional skills to photographers. In the '90s I wrote technology commentary and reviews for magazines, newspapers, and web publications, including Wired, Salon.com, FamilyPC, the late lamented Web Review, and the Chicago Tribune. Feel free to email me.

Book Project

I'm co-authoring a book, "Python Web Development with Django", with Jeff Forcier and Wesley Chun. It will be published by Prentice Hall in July 2008, but is available for pre-ordering on Amazon now.

Colophon

This site is built on a fresh trunk checkout of Django, running on Python 2.5.1, served by Apache and mod_python. The database is SQLite. The operating system is FreeBSD, on a VPS hosted at Johncompanies.com. Comment-spam protection by Akismet. Vintage topo imagery from the Maptech archive.

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Stuff I Use

Akismet, del.icio.us, Django, dpaste.com, Emacs, FreeBSD, Freenode, jQuery, LaunchBar, MacPorts, Markdown, Mercurial, OS X, Postfix, Python, SQLite, Subversion, TextMate, Trac, Ubuntu Linux, wmii

A Django site.
(Finally!)

Copyright 2008
by Paul Bissex
and E-Scribe New Media

Learning Haskell inch by inch

I did some more Haskell reading over the long weekend, mostly from Yet Another Haskell Tutorial*. There is definitely some challenging stuff (the Monads chapter in A Gentle Introduction to Haskell begins, 'This section is perhaps less "gentle" than the others...').

Overall, though, the combination of elegance and power and consistency in Haskell is very satisfying. The language has very little to apologize for.

I'm not really able to write much code yet, but I've started to be able to read it. I'm playing with adding Haskell coloring to dpaste, via the HsColour colorizing engine (written in Haskell, naturally). In trying to track down some formatting glitches -- which may well turn out to be in my code, not theirs -- I was actually able to look at the HsColour source and kind of understand how it does its thing.

I meant it when I said this was a project for the year -- I know there will be stretches where I just have to put it down in order to get other things done. But it looks like I'm going to have no regrets.

_* Unrelated to programming, but it's awfully sad that the current top Google hit for "YAHT" is a page full of boat pictures._

Tuesday, January 16th, 2007
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Some related posts: Clojure is cool • Clojure talk in Northampton MA • The Language I Will Kind of Learn in 2008: Smalltalk • Understanding tuples vs. lists in Python • OSCON 2007, Day 3 • Real-World Haskell: A new book • Neat Python hack: infix operators • Yegge's crusade • The whitespace brigade • It's Haskell

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