Digital Digressions by Stuart Sierra
From programming to everything else
Steve Yegge, who spent 7 years working on distributed computing at Amazon, writes about a book called Purely Functional Data Structures. Yegge: “it’s abundantly clear that it’s time for us to move up to a higher level of abstraction. … Object-Oriented interfaces are failing us, and we need to turn today’s network into a computer…
Another blog named Digital Digressions (nuts, and it looks like she used it first, too) points to a video demo of a touch screen with multiple contact points. This is the interface I want! Everything on the screen responds to touch. You can move things around, zoom or resize, stretch, pull, and “play” with objects…
Or, why is the most frequently-asked question on every web programming framework mailing list, “How do I serve a static page?” Alan J. Perlis’ epigram on programming #54: Beware of the Turing tar-pit in which everything is possible but nothing of interest is easy. Beware indeed. Abstraction isn’t free and the #1 sin of programming…
I really like the idea of Zooming Interfaces. I think they provide a better solution to having multiple documents/objects on the screen than the current overlapping-window pattern. The demo linked above has some pretty severe limitations, but even so I found it easier and more enjoyable to explore than a web site with a comparable…
Quiet A.I. I think this will be the way A.I. ultimately sneaks in to everyday life. It’s already happening on the web. But this response on kuro5hin is a fair warning. Choose carefully what you feed your digital “children”!
To clarify for some respondants to Voted Off the Planet: As far as I know, the decision to remove my blog from Planet Lisp was not made collectively by readers but solely by the site’s maintainer. As is apparent from comments on the announcement, some people approved of the decision and some did not, but…
This is just an random idea that popped into my head. Tell me if I’m crazy. Is there enough distinction between literals in code and values generated at runtime? In other words, what should be the difference between this: x = “Hello, World!” and this (syntax made up): x = new String(“Hello, World!”) In general,…
Consider the following simple bit of mathematical notation: the TeX code that draws it: \sqrt[4]{\frac{x^2+1}{x-1}} and the same thing in an S-expresion syntax like Common Lisp: (exp (/ (+ (exp x 2) 1)) (- x 1)) (/ 1 4)) and in a typical function-call notation like Python: pow((x**2+1)/(x-1), 1/4) I know which one I’d prefer…
Why indeed?
Christian Neukirchen (A.K.A. Anarchaia) pointed out a Mac OS X app called WriteRoom (there’s a Windows twin called Dark Room). It’s a full-screen text editor with absolutely no word processing features. No bold, no italic, no paragraph formatting, just text. As the introduction says: Walk into WriteRoom and your busy computer life fades away. The…