Geekstorming

Intentional Software, my lovely and talented employer, put on a rather smashing demo at the DSL DevCon on Friday.  You might like to watch the video, or perhaps read Martin Fowler’s thoughts.

Hey, Jonathan Edwards released the source and binaries for his Schematic Tables demo.  (Paper, Video)

If you’ve got any belief at all that notation can make your life as a programmer better, it’s definitely worth checking out.

Blogger has decided that it doesn’t want to SFTP into HCoop anymore, so I’ve moved to Wordpress.  I’ve done my best to keep all of the URLs the same, including the Atom feed (which was an incredible pain in the ass to preserve; I couldn’t manage to make it work without directly hacking the source).  You might’ve seen some hairiness on that end; it should be sorted now.

I’m hoping to update this a little more often now that I actually have the ability to do so again.

There is no better feeling on Earth than replacing a buggy, complicated, difficult to follow piece of code (which caused you untold pain six months ago as you spent weeks tweaking it into a superficially-working state) with an easy to follow solution, created in a day and a half, which is obviously and testably correct. It’s like discovering that you’re one of those mythical superprogrammers, 10x more efficient than the “average programmer”, because the average programmer was you, six months ago. You might think that the comparison isn’t valid because I solved the problem once already, but … Continue Reading

I have a friend who is taking a first-year computer science course. She’s come into this course without any programming knowledge. Her school requires her, for her degree, to take a number of introductory courses for various science disciplines — she isn’t going to take another computer science course after this one.This introductory comp sci course teaches Java. Java, as you probably know, is a language in which the canonical “Hello, world!” program takes seven lines of code and requires you to invoke the following concepts:

• Classes
• Static methods
• Command-line arguments
• Visibility

None of which, you may notice, have … Continue Reading

Sometimes I can’t help myself from trying to be the voice of reason in inane Slashdot threads. It’s a curse. Recently one came up entitled, “Staying On-Top of Programming Trends?“”Trends are constantly changing, upgrading, or become popular due to high end user demand or just basic usefulness. I do my best to keep up with the trends, believing that for the most part they will be better then the current methods in place, or just comfort in knowing that if enough people use it, that there will be allot of help out there. Ultimately though, its … Continue Reading

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

This first-person shooter written in Haskell makes me happy. I feel I should learn more about functional reactive programming; it looks like a fantastically useful technique. I’ll definitely be reading that thesis.