Digital Digressions by Stuart Sierra
From programming to everything else
The most famous piece of Lisp-related vaporware is vapor no longer: Arc has been released. After paging through the tutorial, I’m a bit underwhelmed. It looks like just a bunch of syntactic sugar implemented on top of Scheme. Clojure is more interesting and more innovative. Clojure and Arc have some things in common: data structures…
I finally found out how to do this, from the Rails Routing shortcut by David Black. In the Rails console, do this: include ActionController::UrlWriter default_url_options[:host] = ‘whatever’ Then you can call your named route methods directly from the console.
I am happy to report that AltLaw.org‘s switch to Solr has worked very well. Solr is a RESTful search engine, built on Lucene. The setup was more complicated than just using a search library, but the rewards were worth it. Before, I was using Ferret, which I still like. It’s a great library, and Dave…
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…