Sometimes I feel like every time I come up with a good idea, I read about it somewhere else a week later. It least it’s nice to have some indication I’m not a raving lunatic. This time, A List Apart suggests Paper Prototyping, just what I was talking about a week ago.
In one of my first posts, I asked “Why do we speak of programming languages instead of programming notation?” My thought was, and still is, that code in any existing programming language is just one possible representation of an abstract computational process. Higher-level languages like Lisp are good because they bring the written [...]
I’ve just dived into Rails and Ruby in the past couple of months, but I’ve already benefited from it, so here’s my entry in the How has Ruby on Rails made you a better programmer contest.
1. I finally get Model-View-Controller
I’ve seen MVC before, once long ago in the Microsoft C++ Foundation Classes, later for the [...]
I went and got a massage last week. After being relieved of a great deal of muscle tension and no small sum of money, I returned to the spa’s locker room to take a shower. On the wall of the shower stall was hung a sign, about a foot square, printed with large [...]
I like Lisp’s prefix syntax. It’s consistent, has natural structure, and makes code-manipulation macros possible. But it’s not always the easiest to read or write. For example, I often want to apply several successive transformations to the same chunk of text. In Perl, I could use the default variable $_ and [...]
Well, a new year, and (finally) a new post. In the past two weeks I have undertaken a complete rewrite of Project Posner from Common Lisp to Ruby on Rails. Now, before the Lispniks descend upon me with their sharp parenthetical barbs, allow me to explain. The Common Lisp version was never [...]