Digital Digressions by Stuart Sierra
From programming to everything else
New York State’s Office for Technology released a Request for Public Comment on selecting an XML-based office data format. The choices are OASIS’ ODF and Microsoft’s OOXML. Responses were due by 5 p.m. today, Dec. 28. My response is below, submitted just in time to meet the deadline. I didn’t have time to answer all…
Dan Weinreb posted common Complaints About Common Lisp. My personal complaint is in there — the lack of libraries that are well-documented and regularly updated. I think it’s a critical mass problem: so few people are using Common Lisp in their day-to-day work that there’s not enough momentum to keep the libraries going and make…
Further thoughts on my new XO-1 Laptop: It is possible to type on it, albeit not as fast as on a regular keyboard. It’s a real Linux installation — Redhat — on an x86-compatible processor. You can run “yum” in a root shell to install any package you want. The hardware/software integration needs some more…
Just got my XO-1 laptop today, and I’m using it to write this post. First impressions: It’s light–weighs about as much as a hardback book. The screen is sharp and readable, with or without the backlight. The built-in rubber keyboard is difficult for an adult to touch-type on. I’m hoping I’ll get used to it.…
Larry Wall writes about scripting, “I can’t define it, but I’ll know it when I see it.” So I thought I’d throw out my idea of a definition. A scripting language is a programming language that relies on and is designed to run within an ecosystem based on other languages. So Perl 5 and Ruby…
A couple nights ago I walked down to LispNYC in the East Village to hear Rich Hickey talk about Clojure, his new Lisp-like language. To be honest, I wasn’t expecting much. Another Lisp? Ho hum. I’m sure it’s very clever and cool and all, but not something I can actually use. Instead, I was blown…
AltLaw.org began life as a Ruby on Rails project. I was enamored of Rails at the time (who wasn’t?) and rapid-prototyping helped me get it up and running in just a few months. The problem is that I’ve been trying to follow Rails’ conventions even when they aren’t exactly in line with what I need…
While playing with my current all-consuming project, AltLaw.org, I came across this case: Wallace v. IBM. In 2006 a man named Daniel Wallace sued various distributors of GNU/Linux, including IBM, Red Hat, and Novell, for “price-fixing.” Since the GPL ensures Linux will always be free, Wallace argued, he cannot afford to enter the market with…
An interesting tidbit: can your programming language parse a < b < c? Perl can’t. Ruby can, but returns an error “undefined method `>’ for false:FalseClass.” Interestingly, Python accepts it, and even gives the correct result. Something clever must be going on in the parser to make that work. Update October 17: Although Lisp can’t parse the expression…
A cool new site, with the best possible slogan, “All the code that’s fit to printf().” Nice to see a giant media company getting into this.