November 19th, 2005
| Filed under Lisp
|
http://weblog.hypotheticalabs.com/?p=59
… if a developer is already familiar with one Algol-based language how much benefit will they receive from learning another Algol-based language? Most likely the developer will pick up a new syntax without learning any new core concepts.
I’ve been saying something like this for a while. We need to teach something to break students out of a single way of thinking about problem. I suggested Lisp, Scheme or a functional language, Masa suggested Smalltalk, Nick suggested Objective-C, but it doesn’t really matter as long as it’s sufficiently different to force students (and staff come to that) to re-evaluate how they think about problems.
November 18th, 2005
| Filed under Misc
|
I’ve been meaning to have a go at indoor-climbing for a while, but never got around to it. But tootling along with the dog earlier today I noticed a sign on a warehouse near me and popped in. Yep, there’s a climbing gym 10 minutes walk from my house. I really don’t have any excuse now.
November 10th, 2005
| Filed under Misc
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The D Language
D is basically C++ updated. Probably the biggest change for a developer is that it includes a garbage-collector, but there are other interesting features for systems-programmers, eg. closures.
November 10th, 2005
| Filed under Misc
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Had a quick go at installing Nexenta, the Debian-on-OpenSolaris port…
It’s pre-alpha quality at the moment, but is a potentially interesting project; the solaris kernel has some useful features (primarily Dtrace), and Debian has excellent packaging and adminstration support.
November 7th, 2005
| Filed under Jabber
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I spent some of yesterday starting work on an XMPP library for Lisp, mostly some low-level XML-parsing stuff, as I’ve been threatening to do that for a while. Come in Monday morning and Lemonodor posts about one that’s already in progress. Ho Hum.
Update: It appears that the library doesn’t support SASL or TLS, so that precludes its use for most servers currently.
November 7th, 2005
| Filed under Lisp
|
I spent some of yesterday starting work on an XMPP library for Lisp, mostly some low-level XML-parsing stuff, as I’ve been threatening to do that for a while. Come in Monday morning and Lemonodor posts about one that’s already in progress. Ho Hum.
Update: It appears that the library doesn’t support SASL or TLS, so that precludes its use for most servers currently.
