Natural Language Principles in Perl
2003-04-29 7:39PM
Natural Language Principles in Perl -- I had read this before but a long, long time ago. It certainly is an interesting read. I like language design.
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Natural Language Principles in Perl -- I had read this before but a long, long time ago. It certainly is an interesting read. I like language design.
Are Dynamic Languages Going to Replace Static Languages?
My $.02. Languages will allow both. Dynamic typing will be the default, but more and more languages will allow you to specify hints (or just switch into a static mode):
It's not just software and systems development that occurs in pulses; rather, life, in general, just happens in pulses. There's downtime; standard base line existence. You have days 1, 2, 3,... x; and they all happen relatively the same with just enough deviance to make things interesting. Then, WHAM! Suddenly you are confronted with a seemingly boundless nexus of decisions that all have fairly wide spread ramifications.
In the past 4 hours, I have quadrupled my work productivity of the week. Sweet, sweet zone. I finally got tired of writing design docs, noticed that the DB design has been fairly static now, and implemented it in its entirety.
But, now I am too hungry to export all of the SQL code, scp all the resultant files from the Oracle box to my Linux workstation, and check it in to CVS. I'll do that on Monday. It's not going anywhere. (This is where ominous music plays in the background foreshadowing the complete destruction of the Oracle server and the backup system leaving all of the code forever gone because I wanted some pizza.)
I just bought new mountain biking shoes for this season's riding. Next bike toy: new pedals -- Egg Beaters. According to the reviews, they are not the greatest pedal in the world, but they are designed so well. I just need to pay homage to good engineering and design. They are like the RX-8 of the mtb shoe world (in my screwed up mind).
Figured I would go ahead and de-obfuscate my blog.sig.
I had actually been thinking about this a lot. When I blog, a lot of my entries look like this one, where most of the link "text" is this this this and not anything descriptive.
Ever have one of those days... You have some of your prototyping code open, two browser windows open -- one to the design and one to the specifications; but you cannot get anything done. The zone just will not come to you. No matter how hard you try to force it, no matter how intently you read over the code with your fingers hovering over the keyboard ready to type, you cannot slide into the grove.
For absolutely no other reason than he did not explicitly tell me to not post this.
Sometimes I just over-design things. I like design. Design is creative. I like implementation, too. But, design is where the fun is.
So, I am building a meta-directory from scratch. During design, I encountered some problems with the common implementations. They were not terrible problems and could easily be worked around with some code on top of code on top of DB triggers, but I just had to think that there must be a better way.
This (The 3G/2.5G Controversy: GSM vs. CDMA) is a good article talking about "cell" (actually, PCS) phone protocols and the next generation thereof. Very informative and good addendum to my mobile phone network research.
If this does not say gnubbs, I don't know what does -- Building a Stained Glass Computer Case.
When you have two people passionately enthused in a single arena of male-dom, it is all too easy to predict what will occur when you put them together.
I just tried to go to the "new" Arabica here in Lakewood in an effort to write-up the weekend's car stories. This Arabica promised to provide me with a place to drink coffee, formulate thoughts, and smoke because, Lord knows, if I am a-writin'; I am a-smokin'. But, alas, the damn place was brimming with people leaving little seating facilities. On top of that, it was Open Mic night meaning 97 different persons and their brothers would be on stage poorly invoking the spirit of Bob Dylan as they wind their way to their goal of becoming "America's Modern Folk Singer."
Too
Many
People
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Taking a weekend trip down to visit Scott in Dayton. Going to spend a lot of time talking about cars and the inevitability of motorcycles. (Sometimes, I wonder where I get all the money to do this; then I remember, "that's right; I don't actually have it.")
This, also, brings up the need to consolidate my blogs. Each time I take a trip, I post to both. Redundancy is bad.
Taking another weekend getaway. This time I am going to Dayton to visit Scott.
I have these two blogs: this one, the Right Half, and the Left Half. I explain in Why Do I Have Two Blogs the reasoning why -- an extra layer of categorization.
But, sometimes, I post entries (like this one) that could belong to both sites; and the only way to do that with the current setup is to duplicate the entries (bad) or do some hacking. Or... I could just redo the setup.
The current project I am leading at work is to overhaul the travelling of our data. In addition to gathering, munging, formatting, and normalizing the data; I need to hand roll a Meta-Directory. I have read up on how other Universities have done it (University of Maryland, University of Alabama, and Boston College), but I am not convinced they did it correctly. And, if you are going to reinvent a wheel, the damn thing better be just as round as an Enterprise level software round thing-a-majig. So, I got to thinking...
Just stumbled onto The Artima Developer Community. Good web site for reading blog entries on programming. Hop on over to their blog section -- Artima Weblogs -- and check out their list of bloggers: Guido Van Rossum, Ward Cunnigham, Jim Waldo, and Ken Arnold.
Here is the long awaited second installment of the almighty trip to Vegas. If you have not yet read the disclaimer, I bid you to do so now.
Over on the O'Reilly weblogs, Schuyler Erle talks about the, now much-blogged, Hundred-Year Language article in his The Other Side of the Hundred-Year Language. He points out that, in 100 years, programming languages will have had to strike some compromise between clarity and expressiveness versus complexity. This is contrary to Paul's notion that languages should remain simple. To quote, "cruft breeds cruft" and "axioms-- the fewer, the better."
I think that we can have our cake and eat it, too.
Sterling Hughes: Mapping Parrot to PHP
I did not actually expect the PHP developers to directly consider having PHP5 run on Parrot. I had always assumed that the PHP developers would come out with PHP5; and Zend would, subsequently, release PHP5 versions of Optimizer®, Accelerator®, Go Even Faster®, Super Duper Faster®, etc. Following that, a separate bunch of clever people would write up a PHP->Parrot byte-code compiler; thus, creating PHP that runs on Parrot.
That is not to say that it is absolutely certain the PHP5 developers are going to have it running on Parrot, but this marks the first nuances of that possibility. I would have to say that it is a good idea; however, I don't know what Zend will do after that. I have a suspicion that it will be difficult to optimize Parrot more than it already will be optimized. (After all, I think Dan is putting plenty of weight on having Parrot run rather quickly; no one likes to get a pie in the face.) I am not sure what product Zend would begin to hawk other than their IDE. Though, I am not even sure what direct correlation there exists between the PHP-dev group and Zend. Maybe the developers act completely independently. I guess I had just always assumed Zend provided some financial backing for PHP's development, and I don't know what sway that affords them.
Just speculating a little...
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Anti-OOP person who actually offers some insight into why and some alternative approaches. Interesting read, if nothing else...
Speculation about Microsoft's mysterious X#
In the article, they speculate that X# is going to be a full-fledged programming language (like C#) rather than an XSLT replacement. The difference between C# and X# will be that X# uses an XML-compliant syntax a.k.a. you will write programs in XML (or something that can be easily converted to XML) that can be compiled to .Net byte-code.
That's what the article speculates. I think I know what X# is. It is going to allow you to write a C# program (or a program in any other .Net language), compile it into byte-code and X#, and then de-compile it into any other .Net language.
I stumbled upon this while reading Synopsis 6. I have not actually read it, yet. But, from my skimming, seems pretty darned interesting if you are into that wacky Perl linguistic stuff.
Damian's Synopsis 6 is out. That just means about 2 more months until Exegesis 6!! (I know, 2 months may seem like a long time, but considering what it has to cover...)
No, I am not really going to "warblog"; we all have our opinions; but please, keep yours to yourself because it is most likely stupid.
What I did want to point out is the humor of the masses.
I just got done finding the emails to my House and Senate representatives and writing them displaying my displeasure over Congress to Make PATRIOT Act Permanent.
So, after much ballyhoo from the The Impatient One, I present to you the first in a five part series that describes -- in great detail at some points and more like broad, sloppy Van Gogh-like brush strokes in others -- the infamous trip to Vegas.
Be forewarned, you, my gentle reader, are sure to encounter offensive material, sexist remarks, the cavortings of drunk males, and other completely un-delectable items not fit for the consumption of the innocent. We are an unclean group of people -- the kind Jesus warns you about in church. You should listen to that guy: smart chap. But, without more ado concerning threats of inhumane content, read on.
So, most of my blog entries are car related or brief narratives on what I did one night (followed by more car stuff); but in general, my blog entries are very loosely associated with my specific personal going-on's. I have a car; I am in the market for buying a cell phone; I take trips; I think about programming and the IT industry. That's what I write about.
IBM Runs Out of Stock Shares -- Chuckie last seen selling apples on street corners.
Server Software Will Become a Commodity. It hasn't already?
Even though this is a more technical discussion and should probably be placed under the other side of my brain, I have been making my cell phone posts on this blog; so I will try to maintain consistency over accurate categorization (always stay the course).
So, here, I made mention of communities being a "killer feature" of a programming language. Now, it night be that because I was thinking about it, I kept subconsciouly finding myself at sites discussing it. Or, maybe, a bunch of others simultaneously noticed it at the same time I did. But whatever it was, it sprung from everywhere. And, since the other bases have been covered in the other blog entries, I asked myself "what brings about this community?" More specifically to programming languages, what aspects do programming languages have that fascilitate the gathering of a community?
It seems that Erika Morphy's job is to just repeat one thing over and over and over and over again. For a year, now, her job has consisted of writing article after article all boiling down to "modularity in enterprise software is good but don't overdo it." State the obvious, call it "analytical reporting of the IT industry," rather, rinse, repeat, reap money.
Surfing through the O'Reilly weblogs, I came across William Grosso's blog entry "Why Java is Better than You Think". I am not going to comment on why he likes Java so much. He has valid and well-defined points, and all of them are good (and all of them can be applied to any modern programming language *oops* I said I was not going to comment). But, the one statement that really stood out in his talk was something I never considered fully even though I've been prompted to do so before.
New programmers must be able to get up to speed in the language.
Tomorrow is my birthday. I will be one case old (that's 24 years old for you non-drinkers.) To celebrate, I am going to Detroit. Why? Not sure, yet -- going to find out once I get there.
I will be in Detroit this weekend. A man of many places... many places.
Damn! Well, it has finally happened. For years, I have resisted the urge to get a yuppie comlink. But, my resistance is wearing thin. So, link me up! Find me anywhere! Page me! Text me! Trifle me with your thoughts at the drop of a hat! Bind me to your communicative ether! I want to succumb to the lowest common denominator of consumerism! I can no longer escape the call of society's stupidity; I am going to acquire a cell phone. (I feel as if I have failed some imaginary being that was out there rooting for me to continue the resistance.)
But, before I can buy a cell phone. I must know anything and everything about them.
Ummm... "Steal from MS, and you sleep with the fish... errr... you drink antifreeze." It's about cars and software, anyways. Weird, just damn weird...
The EMCA announced that their will be native XML in ECMAScript. How it is being implemented is better explained by John Schneider in this article. That's nice and all (probably will not spell the end to XSLT). But, what I really want is for them to fix ECMAScript.
Everyone has seen Big Blue's commercials that tout servers that can heal themselves. Marketing-speak is a funny thing.
I had been wondering what this was all about, and while the article is not technical, it does touch on a couple of points.
I have Emily back. I got her back yesterday morning. I took it easy on my commute to and from work yesterday -- testing the waters with her. Last night, after getting home, I got into her a little more. She responded well to 80% throttle, hard braking, and snapping into turns. But, today, on my way to work, she got a chance to go WOT.
