There is a classic set of programming exercises called “Ninety-Nine Prolog Problems”. Though somewhat tailored to logic programming, they form an interesting set of exercises for other languages. I’ve seen adaptations of varying completeness for Haskell, Lisp, Perl 6, and Python.
I was reminded of this all by a recent blog post by some bloke called Dave who was using the problems as a way to become more familiar with Python. He used Python’s unittest module to test his solutions.
Very cool news – Mercurial 1.0 has been released. See the announcement and the site for details. There are no earth-shaking individual changes in this release, just a long list of improvements that have been made since 0.9.5.
One of the new features is easy_install friendliness, so assuming you’ve got that installed, getting the new version of Mercurial is as easy as:
$ sudo easy_install http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/release/mercurial-1.0.tar.gz
If you want to be kind to the server, since it’s getting pounded today, you can do this instead in order to make your request via the Coral CDN:
Tonight we had a special edition of the Western Mass. Developers’ Group as Rich Hickey made the long trek north to talk to us about Clojure, his functional Lisp dialect that runs on the JVM.
I enjoyed Rich’s presentation a lot. He’s clearly a very smart guy with very focused goals for the language. He breezed through the basic Clojure intro stuff to get to slides and a demo app focused specifically on concurrency issues. He walked us through almost every piece of the example app, a simple graphical simulation a couple hundred lines long. Remarkably, given that I have almost no non-toy experience with Lisp or Java, I found it mostly understandable.
A former colleague from my days in print design (and a wonderfully loyal reader of my blog to boot) writes to ask whether he should learn Python. He’s a smart guy with a deep background in typography, publishing, and the Mac. He is not a programmer by trade, but has taught himself enough PHP to build a custom CMS for his newspaper. He writes:
I’ve invested so much time in PHP, and am quite proficient now (not bad for it being more of an avocation), but I respect your opinion and for a long time have wondered about switching.
From a post at Rogue Amoeba:
Funny, it reads more like a list of demands! I’m +1 on it all though.