I’ve been interested in REST as a principle for Web service design for a while now. Rather than reimplement pre-WWW methodologies for network communication over the web, REST offers a way to use the power and resilience of the web itself to guide the way we develop applications. Ever since Ruby on Rails 1.2 brought […]
Author: mh
As someone who makes a living writing software, I experience the nature of my work and the opinions of the communities of programmers I encounter as generally consistent: programming is hard; tools help a bit; but there are no silver bullets, only lead ones. But there are remarkable discontinuities in this experience. From time to […]
I think I finally understand the atomicity of time in Clojure’s modeling of state. Function application constructs time in Clojure: there is the value of an identity before a function’s application, and there is the value of the identity after the application. The timeline of a program, as far as state is concerned, is not […]
I love Twitter. At first I thought it was a fad. Fluff. Then I realized it puts you in a virtual room with a lot of people you respect and lets you follow their thought processes in real time. And as you try hard to tweet something worthwhile, every now and then you might actually […]
I keep a text file open as I work, and when I learn something, or fix a bug, I make a note of that in the text file. I call it my journal. It’s pretty low-tech, but text search turns out to be a sufficient way to look up past experiences when I find myself […]
I need to clarify my interests. I keep getting calls from recruiters who want to hire me to do Perl or database management. So, I am trying out an experiment in self-analysis by describing my enthusiasms as they relate to specific programming languages. I am currently interested in the web software applications of Ruby, JavaScript, […]
I sure am glad I went to the Bmore on Rails hack night yesterday. I got some invaluable help from Paul Barry hacking together a working template handler for mustache in Rails 3.
At RailsConf, Jeremy McAnally noted that no one had built a new-style Rails generator for the mustache template system. So I’m giving it a try. You can see my progress so far on github. I’ve forked the rails3-generator project started by José Valim and carried on by several contributors, and I’ve added just a little […]
Giles is right. As usual. In my recent post, I included a passage from Giles’ blog that I disagreed with. Except… Giles didn’t author that passage, Seth Godin did. Giles was just quoting it. I’m sorry, Giles. I’m correcting my post now. Nothing stings quite like announcing your own brilliant close reading and then discovering […]
I read an interesting article by Dave Fayram (kirindave) contrasting monkeypatching in Ruby with protocol extension in Clojure. The article compares two of my favorite languages, but I think it was unfortunate to present monkeypatching as the main way to “associate behavior and data in a flexible way.” In fact, Ruby has a number of […]