Digital Digressions by Stuart Sierra
From programming to everything else
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…
I used to be a big fan of Perl. It was the first programming language I really liked. I felt like it didn’t get in my way. CPAN was and still is the best collection of open-source libraries ever assembled. Then I got into Ruby, and was very happy with the way it cleaned up…
I like Lisp’s prefix syntax. It’s consistent, has natural structure, and makes code-manipulation macros possible. But it’s not always the easiest to read or write. For example, I often want to apply several successive transformations to the same chunk of text. In Perl, I could use the default variable $_ and then just write a…
Hello, Lisp world! This is my first released Common Lisp code. Perl in Lisp is a Common Lisp interface to the Perl 5 API. It allows you to run a Perl interpreter embedded inside Lisp and evaluate Perl code. It does not require any C wrapper code — the API definitions are done with CFFI…
Perl was the first programming language I really liked, the first language that made programming fun. Perl has three basic types: “scalars” for atomic values, arrays for ordered sets, and hash tables for unordered sets. (Yes, there are others, but those are the popular ones.) I quickly discovered that these three types can be combined…
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…
Despite all of the AJAX/Web 2.0 hype, the fact remains that most web pages are mostly static. The most efficient way to serve static pages is unquestionably to store them as static files on a file-based web server such as Apache. I add new pages to this site once every few days at most, but…
A common complaint about Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) is that classes can make simple data hard to deal with: “I don’t want a DirectoryList object, I just want a list of strings.” I would say this is not a flaw inherent in OOP but rather in the way it is commonly used. “Encapsulation” and “data hiding”…
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…