Steve Oualline wrote a nifty little Perl program to graph regular expressions. And Oliver Steele wrote an even niftier OpenLaszlo app to show how regular expressions work. Together, they make the best (unintended) argument I’ve seen for visual programming languages. As Oualline writes in his article, “Humans can process images far faster and better than…
Just recently discovered the E Programming Language. Very interesting concept. It’s nice to see a something growing out of the Algol/C/C++/Java tree that improves the syntax. And a mainstream language that can handle concurrency well without blocks and locks is definitely needed. Making programmers deal with threads and mutexes is definitely too hard, just like…
Given the task of designing a programming language, which must be exactly defined for engineering purposes, what would a linguist — as opposed to a mathemetician — do?
In looking around the offices where I have worked, I see innumerable places where existing technology could be leveraged to expedite, simplify, or otherwise enhance day-to-day workflow. Things could happen faster, cheaper, with fewer staff. So why isn’t this done? I think there are two fundamental problems: The first is the disconnect between the potential…
Why does Lisp use hyphens instead of underscores or CamelCase? [Read more…]
What would a programming language designed by a linguist look like? [Read more…]
The beginning of a new web site. A new design (forthcoming), a new focus (soon to be apparent), and new software (WordPress).