The programming language Clojure is enjoying a surge in recent activity and interest, capped by a presentation by its inventor at the end of the Lisp50 program at OOPSLA. Lispy has a good recounting of Hickey’s talk on his blog. There’s interest in forming a study group here in the DC area, under the auspices […]
Author: mh
I’ve been spending too much time with javascript lately. It probably isn’t healthy for me. I’ll get back to my own Clojure project and paying Ruby work soon enough, but right now I’m working on an interface-intensive project, so I’m up to my neck to explicit returns and key:value notation. I was looking into improving […]
So I’m building a web application that uses javascript (with the canvas element) to draw a chart of student grades over a period of time. It also lists each grade in a table on the side of the chart. Since the grade data is dynamic (coming in the form of JSON either at page load […]
I haven’t posted anything to this blog for a while. Apparently I’m not alone. Not blogging is the new blogging: so says Wired. My Scheme-mate Chuck seems to have thrown off his blog as a matter of self-preservation. At the same time, we’ve both been active on Twitter. It is a lot easier to fire […]
A little while ago I posted about my indulgent use of a linked list in a Ruby on Rails project I’m working on. The list allowed me to define the linked objects’ methods in the recursive case analysis style I’ve learned from programming in Scheme. I wrote that I was surprised that this decision hasn’t […]
An old friend of mine, Harris Wulfson, passed away suddenly last week. I hadn’t seen him in years, and we’d only run into each other once since we worked together at Music Boulevard in the 90’s. That running-into happened at a Jazz show in Brooklyn, NY. Harris was a musician and music composition grad student […]
I recently realized I have more things tagged ruby and toread on del.icio.us than I can possibly hope to process. I’ve never been close to a developing technical community before, if following blogs and news sites, and occasionally trying stuff out for myself counts as being close. Is this how it normally goes? Just when […]
Nathan Sanders‘ recent post about functional programming in Ruby includes some advice about not trying to force too much mapping and folding into Ruby. Here’s how he expresses it: “Ruby! OOP! Remember?” But I couldn’t help myself. I spend a good deal of time these days in student mode, programming in scheme, and I really […]
I decided a couple of months ago that my haphazard unit testing practices were not covering enough of my Rails projects’ code. It’s easy, when you’re the only developer on a project, to get pretty lazy about a lot of things, and testing is one of them. See, I believe firmly in testing. Untested code […]
Quite some time ago, I set out to work through the course materials at MIT’s OpenCourseWare website for the introductory Computer Science course Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. I wanted to tackle the fundamental CS concepts that the course presented, but I also wanted to learn Scheme, the elegant Lisp dialect that SICP uses […]