Monthly Archives: June 2006
Dabble DB
The just-released Dabble DB is, to my mind, one of the most innovative pieces of software since the spreadsheet. It’s a relational database that can figure out your data relations for you. It’s a spreadsheet that can run structured queries … Continue reading
Permutations of Iteration
Ah, the loop, so fundamental to programming it’s hard to imagine a single program without one. After all, what’s the use of calculating just one thing? Usually you have a big pile of things you want to calculate, which is … Continue reading
BumpTop 3D Desktop
A desktop that actually behaves like a real desk. I don’t know if I’d want to use it all day, but it sure looks like fun.
Tagged User Interfaces
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JavaScript-like Objects in Ruby (or Lisp)
As part of my exploration of Ruby, I attended Francis Hwang’s presentation to the New York Linux Users’ Group. One feature that caught my interest in his talk was the OpenStruct class, which lets you assign values to arbitrary “slots” … Continue reading
Functional Programming For The Rest of Us
An excellent article introducing the concepts and advantages of functional programming in non-academic language. Now if I could just understand monads…
Ruby: Python for Lisp Programmers
A popular game on comp.lang.lisp is comparing Lisp with Python. Lispers complain that Python has a crippled lambda and no lexical closures, and they hiss and boo whenever Python’s development tends in a non-functional direction. I’ve recently been playing with … Continue reading
Hello, Planet Lisp!
It’s great to be here, even if I am a little intimidated by the company. I’ll try to keep my writing interesting.
List Processing and the Efficiency of CONS
One big difference between Lisp and most other programming languages is its use of recursion instead of iteration. So while I was working on some text-parsing code, I fell in to this simple pattern: (defun process (list) (if list (cons … Continue reading
Do Engines and the Future of Web Applications
Or, What I Have In Common With Craig Silverstein. I’ve been enjoying John Battele’s The Search, a history of the search engine business from Archie to Google. He quotes Google’s first employee, Craig Silverstein, as saying, “I would like to … Continue reading
Goodbye Toolbar, Hello “Ribbon”
Microsoft Office 12 will feature a new interface called the ribbon. I’m not usually a fan of Microsoft interfaces, but this one shows some potential. Office’s hierarchical menus are definitely overloaded, and “Task Panes” are clunky. Moving controls that were … Continue reading
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