Geekstorming

I’m always interested in the challenging of conventional wisdom. So I consider the 40-minute presentation I just watched on Immediate Mode GUIs to be time well spent.Essentially: In a situation where your application is going to be constantly updating the screen — ie, a videogame — you can make some serious optimizations from the traditional object-oriented GUI paradigm which make your code a lot more clear. Rather than having event-driven binding, where you’ve got callbacks everywhere to update your model when the GUI state changes, and update your GUI when your model state changes, you … Continue Reading

So, over the past little while, for a variety of reasons, I’ve been learning Forth. It’s a bizarre, wrongheaded little language that somehow manages to mostly turn its weaknesses into strengths. I can see how its inventor, Chuck Moore, was seduced by it, and by the philosophy of total simplification — once he simplified the problem of the compiler to ridiculous extremes, it fell apart in his hands and he was left with a rather powerful little language.Some quick background:Forth, as a language, is really, really simple. It’s so simple that there isn’t syntax, … Continue Reading

I just killed a couple of days reading Stevey’s Drunken Blog Rants, which is a fascinating account of a talented engineer spending a year searching for better languages, and finding Lisp in the end. Lots of interesting insights — I found his essays on practicing programming and math every day to be particularly inspiring, since I’ve already found Lisp, and Ruby, and OCaml, and Erlang, and pretty much all of the other languages that are mentioned. Except Rebol. That one was new.I’ve resolved to read more of the CompSci books that, … Continue Reading