July 2011
4 posts
June 2011
6 posts
alt/1977: we are not time travelers →
I absolutely fail to see how we can keep our growing programs firmly within our intellectual grip when by its sheer baroqueness the programming language —our basic tool, mind you!— already escapes our intellectual control.
E.W. Dijksta on PL/1, The Humble Programmer
May 2011
11 posts
Huh. I guess our lord and savior took his ball and went home about this whole rapture business.
Controversial issue
Future Change Warning: Proposed Federal censorship regulations may prohibit us from giving you information about the possibility of calling this function. We would be required to say that this is not an acceptable way of terminating a program.
This friendly notice can be found in the section about abnormal termination in the GNU C Library Manual.
Got me thinking though: can a program be...
Scheme 9 from Empty Space, A Guide to Implementing...
A while back I offered to review Nils M Holm’s book Scheme 9 from Empty Space, A Guide to Implementing Scheme in C, available on Lulu as a paperback, PDF and HTML.
It took me way too long, but here it is:
Scheme 9 from Empty Space, A Guide to Implementing Scheme in C is a thorough guide of the internals of the scheme system with the same name. It provides a detailed account of every aspect...
Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines...
– Abelson & Sussman (in SICP)
Things
I really should get back to actually writing on this blog. Being busy with work and moving across town are pretty good reasons alone though, unless you are the kind of person to publish inane everyday ramblings. (Insane ramblings is a different matter.)
Hopefully I will post more interesting tidbits about work related things and my personal projects. Right now I can report that I’m best...
Lisp: the anti-fashion language - A blog by Pavel... →
April 2011
4 posts
Abstract Heresies: 50 years ago — April 28, 1961 →
March 2011
9 posts
The Hitchhiker's Guide to Concurrency
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable beginning of the 21st century lies a small subset of human knowledge.
Within this subset of human knowledge is an utterly insignificant little discipline whose Von Neumann-descended architecture is so amazingly primitive that it is still thought that RPN calculators are a pretty neat idea.
This discipline has — or rather had — a problem,...
As I’ve gained more experience with Perl it strikes me that it resembles...
– Tim Moore (on comp.lang.lisp)
If you watch Superman backwards, it is about a guy...
Yttermera | Kultur: Svenska ordspråk, något... →
Swedish sayings, somewhat altered
February 2011
6 posts
The Glorious Horror of TECO | Good Math, Bad Math →
TECO: the Lovecraftian editor
Lexing et tu
I’ve been playing around with the external term format of Erlang in Ruby and I figured it would be handy to be able to compile the terms from strings into the corresponding binary representation.
My google-fu is weak and I couldn’t find any lexers that would let me declaratively specify rules, so I decided to roll my own:
Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft...
– Bill Gates
Robert Virding and Joe Armstrong - The history of the Erlang virtual machine (by Erlang Solutions)
January 2011
9 posts
I
Really, I do. Call me a sucker, but dammit, it actually manages to make piracy feel cumbersome.
Also, I found Dink Smallwood available for free, which makes things even better!
Slutet gott, allting gott
This past friday marked the end of my student life with the presentation of my thesis. Don’t know what to say, really… Good riddance? And I lived happily ever after?
Slutet gott, allting gott.
zoon politikon: Min vän, Johan →
stromholm:
Johan forcerade ned sin tredje ostfralla med en belåten suck. Kaffet rykte som Mordors eldar bredvid honom - han övervägde inleda dagens chokladkavalkad (liksom varje dag) med det nyöppnade paketet Oreos bredvid honom. Chokladen sjöng sin sirensång och det var inte många sekunder förren en kaka…
The Axis Of Eval: Why Lisp is a Big Hack (And... →
Interesting read. Lisp is a hack, but it gives me such a nice, warm, fuzzy feeling every time I play with it.
Haskell is cool as hell, though.
I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
– Douglas Adams
December 2010
12 posts