Among others, Light Table, Code Bubbles, Squeak, and Bret Victor‘s Inventing on Principle talk make me ponder where we’re going as programmers. Yes, I’m not ashamed of the term, even though developer is the currently-fashionable word and programmer has been demeaned by popular mis-use (though not as severely as hacker). But I digress. On one [...]
My older son has gone back to school to study IT, and we occasionally discuss his courses or internship (though not his homework). As a graphic artist, musician, gamer, and box-builder, he is an experienced user, but thinking as a programmer is new to him. Therefore I find his perspective on programming an interesting counterpoint [...]
Convenience stores sometimes get robbed. That’s wrong. But suppose lobbyists for the convenience store industry got congress to pass legislation that would authorize the stores to: Keep assault weapons under the counters; Use them at will under a “shoot first, ask questions later” policy; and Exempt them from responsibility for using deadly force if they [...]
There was a time when saying, “This is a nation governed by law“, brought honor and pride. That statement was associated with many others, such as, “All persons are equal before the law“, that emphasized that the same rules applied to everyone, regardless of economics, education, race, or any of the other attributes that in [...]
Hungry and in a hurry, I dropped into the diner and ordered eggs and toast. The server returned shortly with an electric skillet, a toaster, two whole eggs, and two slices of bread. As I cracked the eggs into the skillet, the server came back along the counter with a bag of coffee beans and [...]
Our experience on Day 0 of JPR11 yielded a nice example of the need to choose an appropriate implementation of an abstract concept. As I mentioned in the previous post, we experimented with Michael Barker’s Scala implementation of Guy Steele’s parallelizable word-splitting algorithm (slides 51-67). Here’s the core of the issue. Given a type-compatible associative [...]
Despite the winter storm and avalanche warnings in the Crested Butte area, the flight into Gunnison went off without a hitch. The last few miles of descent were as bumpy as an old dirt road, but the sky was mostly clear, as were the roads leaving the airport. A few miles uphill, the story was [...]
“Horseless carriage.” Hold that thought. Goals I got my iPad as a tool to accomplish things with more mobility and efficiency, not to spend time wandering virtual supermarket aisles looking for the shiniest variation on a theme. Given that, I was immediately attracted by this title from O’Reilly. Both the author, Peter Meyers, and the [...]
I’m encouraged and excited by what I see coming from user-led conferences. I’ve had great first-hand experiences at the Java Posse Roundup (rumor is February 21-25 this coming year), No Fluff Just Stuff, and StrangeLoop (2010); and I’ve really benefitted from materials published on-line by other conferences, such as Devoxx and—a recent discovery—JRubyConf. I was [...]
R is a statistical computing environment that is fully-compliant with state-of-the-art buzzwords: free, open-source, cross-platform, interactive, graphics, objects, closures, higher-order functions, and more. It is supported by an impressive collection of user-supplied modules through CRAN, the “Comprehensive R Archive Network”. (Sound familiar?) And now it has its own O’Reilly Nutshell book, R in a Nutshell, [...]
