Posts tagged: PROGRAMMING

Often after one of our Western Mass. Developer Group meetings I want to make a list of things we talked about. This time I actually did it. This only includes stuff I talked about or was within earshot of – minus the top secret material that you can only know about if you show up in person.

• C# structures and their fans and detractors
• BASIC Computer Games, the book
• the Amiga and “guru meditation”. Amiga’s not dead! Again, yet.
• learning assembly language
• the glories of VMS
• help wanted, or at least lacking: Flash, QA, HTML/CSS production
• Making life with Subversion better with svnmerge.py
• Darcs again, plus Mercurial vs. Bazaar. Anything’s better than CVS.
• the glory of the REPL in Ruby and Python
• Free review copies of books for user groups like ours (nice find, Lou!)
• the iPhone – finished writing that Ajax-based Skype client yet?
• the OpenMoko phone (I can’t believe they quoted Andre Gide in a press release)
• Dell shipping policy: “That will take three weeks. OMG WE DID IT IN 8 DAYS DUDE IT’S A MIRACLE”
• MacMall shipping policy: “We’re shipping part of your order on time. Did we mention we don’t have the other part yet? The part with the computer in it?”
• Smalldog, trustworthy Mac merchants
• Drupal, community plumbing
• Trac, even Rails guys dig it
• What do people do with (or think of) your code after you leave your job?
• Crazy UFO photos making the rounds. (My favorite theory after checking the internets is that they are part of a viral marketing campaign for the new Transformers movie)

There was more. It would be neat to have a wiki page for each meeting where we could all dump notes. No pressure on our de facto webmaster implied! But I bet you could whip it up in Rails in, like, 90 seconds.

Back in February I mentioned Scott Rosenberg’s book Dreaming in Code. Somehow I never got around to posting more extended comments. Recently I was asked, by someone who had followed the Chandler project but hadn’t seen the book, to clarify why I thought the story was sad. This post is a cobbling-together of my answer to that question as well as some comments I made in the course of our group-interview on the Well. (Short of reading the book, you can learn quite a bit about it from the many interviews Scott has given.)

That nifty feature Python stole from Haskell (or was it Erlang?), “list comprehensions”, is found in the latest version of Javascript (available in Firefox 2.0) under the name “array comprehensions”. Cool!

via John Resig.

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!