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 on your data. It’s an on-line calendar with RSS feeds. It’s a web form processor…
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 why you need a computer in the first place. I think one of the quickest…
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.
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” within an object. require ‘ostruct’ me = OpenStruct.new me.name = "Stuart Sierra" me.net_worth = -500…
An excellent article introducing the concepts and advantages of functional programming in non-academic language. Now if I could just understand monads…
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 Ruby. Lo and behold, it has real lambdas, closures, and a generally more functional style.…
It’s great to be here, even if I am a little intimidated by the company. I’ll try to keep my writing interesting.
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 (do-something (first list)) (process (rest list))))) Ah, the joys of Lisp-2. If do-something were actually…
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 see the search engines become like the computers in Star Trek. You talk to them…
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 formally buried in modal dialogs out into the ribbon should also make working with the…