Developers, developers, developers

PROGRAMMING

Just got back from my second meeting with the Western Mass. Developers Group. Being the only programmer in my workplace (and having been essentially solo in almost all of my software endeavors), it’s really refreshing for me to talk with other actual working programmers. Plus, we understand each other’s jokes.

Some topics of discussion (unordered):

  • FizzBuzz and code golfing
  • RPG and punch-cards
  • Can you name a program that Eric Raymond wrote besides fetchmail? (Answer: bogofilter)
  • $4,000 DST-change patches
  • Distributed version control (gratuitous mentions of darcs from me)
  • The fundamental turn toward concurrency in software: threat or menace or non-event?
  • Amazon EC2 (sounds very cool; evangelized by Chas)
  • Things to hate about Python
  • Things to hate about Ruby
  • Enumeration of lots of OS X stuff that’s written in C++, not Objective-C
  • Windows Vista on a MacBook ("…I was expecting more!")
  • Lisp as secret weapon, a la Paul Graham (sub-question: can you name a program Paul Graham wrote besides Viaweb?)
  • The TextMate book
  • Fun with Reddit (“Check out this 40-line Haskell program that translates Ruby on Rails code into Erlang!”)

Charles commented on Fri Mar 9 05:56:03 2007:

Just can’t find this entry:

Fun with Reddit (“Check out this 40-line Haskell program that translates Ruby on Rails code into Erlang!”)

Can you please put a link?

Thank you

Paul commented on Fri Mar 9 06:51:09 2007:

Sorry, I meant to put that in the “Exercises” section!

Charles commented on Fri Mar 9 07:22:34 2007:

Still looking for a clue about this enigmatic “Check out this 40-line Haskell program that translates Ruby on Rails code into Erlang!”

What “Exercises” section are you talking about?

Thank you

Chas Emerick commented on Fri Mar 9 08:37:11 2007:

Fun with Reddit (“Check out this 40-line Haskell program that translates Ruby on Rails code into Erlang!”)

Can you please put a link?

I don’t have the link on me, but I’m pretty sure it went through reddit the same day we saw that great writeup of the Perl 6 VM written in Forth.

Paul commented on Fri Mar 9 08:39:02 2007:

Charles (not to be confused with Chas), I hate to break this to you, but it was a joke – as was my reply. If you read programming.reddit.com long enough you start to get punchy.

Charles commented on Fri Mar 9 08:49:11 2007:

I must be getting too old to understand this kind of joke :)

Thank you for waking me up!

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