Posts tagged: PROGRAMMING

This is exciting – three notable personalities from the Haskell world (Bryan O’Sullivan, Don Stewart, and John Goerzen) have teamed up to write a new book on Haskell for O’Reilly. Even better, it will be published under a Creative Commons license and released chapter-by-chapter on their website.

For now all that’s on their new site is a blog, but that’s sure to change over the coming days and weeks.

http://www.realworldhaskell.org/

I suspect this will become the standard intro to Haskell for working programmers like myself. If only it had been available at the beginning of my year-of-trying-to-learn-Haskell!

Back in January I posted about the idea of having a get-together of Django programmers here in Northampton in June, playing on the Django (Reinhardt) in June music festival happening at the same time.

I finally found time to put a page together, and people are beginning to sign up. So if you’re a Django person and you’re within range of Northampton, check it out!

First we had Shockwave, which begat Flash which begat Flex and Apollo, while meanwhile people have been busy doing Ajax.

Of course Microsoft wants to get in on the action, and Sun does too — announcing JavaFX today.

The name “JavaFX Script” is brilliant – now instead of just confusing Java and Javascript, people can confuse them with JavaFX too! Plus it sounds a little like “Flex” and has two As, a J and an X in it. Maybe Microsoft will rebrand Silverlight as “JFlex.NET” to help things along.

For a long time I’ve wanted to try working with Bicycle Repair Man, the Python refactoring tool. Unfortunately, the fact that it had neither documentation nor integration with my favorite editor kept pushing it to the back burner.

About a month ago I was excited to come across a post from a guy named David Coffin who had created a BRM integration script for TextMate. I hooked it up per his instructions, and with a little fiddling I got it working. The first thing I tried was the Extract Method or Function command. I had code something like this (structurally, I mean):

As I said in my last post, I haven’t found many tech/software podcasts worth sticking with, but since people have asked, here are a few that I generally like.

• LugRadio. Loud men swearing in a small room. Plus Linux and whatnot. This show has some very funny moments, a rarity in tech podcasts. I hear they’re going to do an all-Haskell episode pretty soon.
• Audible Ajax – good, though relatively infrequent
• The Ruby on Rails Podcast is worth following. Even for a Django guy like me.
• For OS X development, CocoaRadio can be instructive.
• And finally, just recently I’ve been picking through the archives of a podcast with some interesting esoteric (for me) discussions: Industry Misinterpretations. Terrible name. It’s about Smalltalk. Remember Smalltalk?

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James Robertson commented on Tue Apr 3 16:07:35 2007:

Python 3, formerly known as “Python 3000”, is coming. If you want to get up to speed, here’s my simple three-step program:

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!”)

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