Posts tagged "auld":

sussmaniana

I'm back from ILC 09, slowly digesting all i lived there. This was my first Lisp conference and my first visit to MIT, a place marked with red big letters in the atlas of my private mythology. And it wasn't only about places: suddenly realizing that you're sitting next to Richard Greenblatt, or enjoying Gerry Sussman's talks in the flesh, was quite an experience, with an almost eerie feeling attached to it.

erlang now!

I don't know whether Monty Python ever wrote a gag on programming languages, but if they did, this Erlang video must be it. The funniest thing is that it is pretty serious, and does a great job showing one of my most cherished abilities when using dynamic languages, namely, adding new functionality to a running system on the fly. As for the Monty Python bit, well, you have to see the to know what i mean: i kept laughing out loud during most of its twelve minutes (those Ericsson engineers seem to be taken from The Larch, but then maybe it's just my sense of humor).

playing with eli's toys

Some weeks ago, as a way to give a serious try to the PLT environment, i wrote my first (and only so far) PLT package, MzFAM, a File Alteration Monitor for MzScheme. MzFAM consists of a set of PLT-scheme modules providing utilities to monitor and react to filesystem changes. It exports a high-level interface consisting of monitoring tasks that run as independent threads and invoke callback procedures each time a file alteration is detected. These high-level tasks are implemented using either Linux's FAM/Gamin monitors or, in systems where it is not available, a pure Scheme fall-back implementation. (A native implementation for BSD systems, based on the kevent/kqueue system calls (see also this nice article to learn more), is on the works.)

the ghost in the lisp machine

A friend of mine uses to say that Emacs fills our yearning for a Lisp Machine. I tend to agree with him: Emacs is not just an editor, but a full integrated environment where you can perform virtually any imaginable task; and, most importantly, the inner workings of the system are open to you to explore and extend. Using, for extra fun, Lisp. No, i don't think that Elisp is the nicest Lisp incarnation around, but is far better than, say, C, and i still prefer it to other scripting languages. Moreover, the awesome range of libraries at your disposal makes up for many of the deficiencies in the language.

geometrically speaking

While a was a full-time physics and maths student, i seldom, if ever, thought of proving anything using a diagram, or any kind of non-algebraic method, for that matter. One could make a couple of drawings every now and then to help understanding, but that was all. Not even after learning differential geometry did my view change. As a matter of fact, with the emphasis on (and the beauty of) abstract representations (as in abstract tensor notations), using drawings of surfaces embedded in Euclidean space felt like cheating. To make things even worse, my first serious physics book had been Landau and Lifshitz's Classical Field Theory, where even words are scarce, let alone drawings or diagrammatic reasoning ¹. In a nutshell, i would have felt at home reading Lagrange's introduction to his Méchanique Analytic²:

physics quotes

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

programmers go bananas

I learned programming backwards, plunging right on into C and, shortly after, C++ and Java from the very beginning. I was knee deep in complex data structures, pointers and abstruse template syntax in no time. And the more complex it all felt, the more i thought i was learning. Of course, i was clueless.

beyond mainstream object-oriented programming

After a few scheming years, i had come to view objects as little more than poor-man closures. Rolling a simple (or not so simple) object system in scheme is almost a textbook exercise. Once you've got statically scoped, first-order procedures, you don't need no built-in objects. That said, it is not that object-oriented programming is not useful; at least in my case, i find myself often implementing applications in terms of a collection of procedures acting on requisite data structures. But, if we restrict ourselves to single-dispatch object oriented languages, i saw little reason to use any of them instead of my beloved Scheme.

as simple as possible...

Einstein's (attributed) quotation has become an aphorism, taken for granted by every mathematician or physicist i've ever met (to mention two kinds of people i've been frequently involved with). One would expect the same attitude from a community that invented the term 'no silver bullet', and yet, since i got into computer science, first for fun and later on for a living, i've found lots of people with, er, a different viewpoint. Take for instance this excerpt from Lisp is sin, a widely cited and commented article by Sriram Krisnan:

the joy of repl

Back in the old days i was a macho C++ programmer, one of those sneering at Java or any other language but C, willing to manage my memory and pointers and mystified by the complexity of the template syntax (it was difficult and cumbersome, ergo it had to be good). Everyone has a past.