Software, Business, and Life
Jul 05 2009
Long-time fans may remember my “flying boxes” demo at the St. Louis Java user group in 2005, or my followup work in 2008, in which I translated that demo to JavaScript (Rhino). I picked that demo project up again last year and recreated it with Flex 3; you can now try it out online, download the code, [...]
Apr 03 2009
Last night (April 2, 2009) at the St. Louis Lambda Lounge I gave a 45-minute talk on the Factor programming language. I’ve uploaded the handout and example code here. I apologize in advance to anyone in the Factor community who reads it and laughs at my “newbie” mistakes and misstatements. Appistry again provided space and pizza [...]
Feb 17 2009
From http://www.theodoregray.com/BrainRot/index.html “The most profound engine of civilization is the inability of a larger and larger fraction of the population to do the basic things needed to survive. Many people fail to realize this.” “Technology’s greatest contribution is to permit people to be incompetent at a larger and larger range of things. Only by embracing [...]
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Dec 05 2008
I recently needed to move a large number of files (millions) in a deep directory structure, into another similar directory structure, “merging” the contents of each directory and creating any missing directories. This task is easily (though slowly) performed on Windows with Control-C Control-V in Explorer, but I could find no obvious way to do [...]
Nov 28 2008
Over the holiday I looked at the Factor programming language, and was very impressed. It has a Lisp-like metacircular quality, and a remarkably wide set of features/libraries in spite of a very small development team and community. Unlike many other small language projects, Factor is fast, rich, and can produce shippable binaries. Its team cares [...]
Oct 20 2008
A while back I was discussing the future of programming languages with a colleague, and we agreed that for all its foibles, JavaScript will continue to enjoy very wide and increasing use in the coming years. I wrote last year about Steve Yegge’s hints that JavaScript is the “next big languages”, see that post for [...]
