A nifty little explanation about why a deeply-layered programming language can save time and money in the long run.
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Révènce writes that if a piece of code is not simple, it is wrong. He’s a bit emphatic, but in large part he’s correct. Programming languages that make complex things simple lead to code which has fewer errors. This is a major factor behind the high-level-language revolution: programmers are discovering that it doesn’t make sense to manage memory manually; that it doesn’t make sense to have to manually write out the components of a for loop; it doesn’t make sense to manually write the same boilerplate time after time.
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Révènce writes that if a piece of code is not simple, it is wrong. He’s a bit emphatic, but in large part he’s correct. Programming languages that make complex things simple lead to code which has fewer errors. This is a major factor behind the high-level-language revolution: programmers are discovering that it doesn’t make sense to manage memory manually; that it doesn’t make sense to have to manually write out the components of a for loop; it doesn’t make sense to manually write the same boilerplate time after time.
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Scott Hackett thanks the TI-99/4A for setting him on his path towards geekdom. We had the same machine (although ours had a different case); I still remember when Dad brought it home from the store. I was very small, but I knew that this was an interesting device. Tunnels of Doom and Hunt the Wumpus were about the coolest thing ever; I remember my brother Tom & I lugging the huge disk drive down the stairs to the den so we could play there.
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Scott Hackett thanks the TI-99/4A for setting him on his path towards geekdom. We had the same machine (although ours had a different case); I still remember when Dad brought it home from the store. I was very small, but I knew that this was an interesting device. Tunnels of Doom and Hunt the Wumpus were about the coolest thing ever; I remember my brother Tom & I lugging the huge disk drive down the stairs to the den so we could play there.
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A great blog entry explains why emacs is so incredibly cool.
Imagine an operating system where you can switch from writing code to browsing the web or chatting without leaving a consistent environment, with the same set of commands and shortcuts. Imagine a set of integrated applications where data is seamlessly shared, where any single functionality can be tweaked, extended and adapted to your particular needs. Where everything is easily scriptable.
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A great blog entry explains why emacs is so incredibly cool.
Imagine an operating system where you can switch from writing code to browsing the web or chatting without leaving a consistent environment, with the same set of commands and shortcuts. Imagine a set of integrated applications where data is seamlessly shared, where any single functionality can be tweaked, extended and adapted to your particular needs. Where everything is easily scriptable.
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I just ran across Craig Finseth’s book The Craft of Text Editing. It’s a kind to implementing a text editor, given the knowledge current as of 1991 (which, sadly, hasn’t progressed a bit — the old text editors are in many cases far more advanced than the modern ones). An essential read if you’re looking to write an emacs-like editor.
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I just ran across Craig Finseth’s book The Craft of Text Editing. It’s a kind to implementing a text editor, given the knowledge current as of 1991 (which, sadly, hasn’t progressed a bit — the old text editors are in many cases far more advanced than the modern ones). An essential read if you’re looking to write an emacs-like editor.
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Many years ago I started to get into Scheme, an academic programming language which was supposed to become the official language of the GNU Project; it was this which drew me to it. After all, if the GNU Project would be using it everywhere, then it’d serve me well to learn it ASAP.
Scheme’s an interesting member of the Lisp family; code is represented as a list which may itself be manipulated.
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Many years ago I started to get into Scheme, an academic programming language which was supposed to become the official language of the GNU Project; it was this which drew me to it. After all, if the GNU Project would be using it everywhere, then it’d serve me well to learn it ASAP.
Scheme’s an interesting member of the Lisp family; code is represented as a list which may itself be manipulated.
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Well, for one, Zed Shaw will kill them if they don’t. But seriously, he brings up some very important points about the use and misuse of statistics in computer science circles.
I’ve used R, the statistical package to which he refers; it’s a nice piece of work, and very useful for my purpose at the time (which was determining the root cause of some performance problems on one of my hosts).
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