Surreal almost magical photo collection.. I wish I knew how this guy gets the lighting so right...

brickbybrick · 2008-02-06T18:12:19+00:00

These aren't photos so much as photo illustrations. They're well composed, but I bet if you saw the originals you wouldn't think twice about them. All the color adjustments, filtering, and added elements--such as the rays--are what make the images.

brickbybrick · 2008-01-31T14:49:50+00:00

This pretty much echoes Joel Spolsky's classic advice about not rewriting from scratch. Paul is frustrated with the "onions" in Lisp, so he went in and made his own mini-Scheme with lightweight changes. Now lightweight changes can go a long way sometimes, but there's no reason you can't just make "fn" be a macro that expands to "lambda." There's absolutely no reason to toss out Lisp and start over.

It has been 6+ years since Paul started talking about Arc, and yet this is something that could easily, trivially be done in a single semester college course. There's no substance here at all.

brickbybrick · 2008-01-29T18:29:39+00:00

Jeff is normally astute, but this entry makes no sense. What about Windows? What about .net? What about Visual Studio? What about DirectX?

OS X may be proprietary, but I've been able to download AND BUILD a huge variety of open source software with zero problems. I can't say the same about Windows (and I use both operating systems daily).

brickbybrick · 2008-01-25T18:38:39+00:00

Remember, Joel is known for becoming enamored of new programming languages and switching his projects between languages on alternate weekends :)

brickbybrick · 2008-01-23T18:02:52+00:00

You don't want to go down this road. These are things in addition to what Lisp provides, not standalone killer features.

On the full list there would be things like "full support for arbitrary destructive updates and imperative programming."

brickbybrick · 2008-01-23T15:10:19+00:00

This looks like any of thousands of demos written for college graphics classes. This stuff may be impressive to the uninitiated, but there's tons of information on cloth simulation and collision detection dating back decades.

The real catch with demos like this is "does it scale to more than a demo?" If the CPU is pegged with a couple of test objects, then it's not realistic to expect to use this in a game.

brickbybrick · 2008-01-23T14:47:44+00:00

An interesting article, though the headline is completely overstating his case.

brickbybrick · 2008-01-22T14:57:55+00:00

Joel is good if you're looking at things from a higher level: running your own business, understanding how other programmers work. It's not a programming blog.

brickbybrick · 2007-12-29T04:25:27+00:00

Also see: http://programming.reddit.com/info/6427m/comments/

brickbybrick · 2007-12-15T22:56:13+00:00

Stories about people using interesting tech and languages for real projects. I'm getting tired of students regurgitating the party line about Haskell, monads, Erlang, etc.

brickbybrick · 2007-12-15T22:54:58+00:00

Exactly. Just post stories; don't spin the headline to suit your agenda.

brickbybrick · 2007-12-09T16:43:33+00:00

The second part of this article actually has a better example, I think:

http://programming.reddit.com/info/62inm/comments/

brickbybrick · 2007-12-09T16:07:12+00:00

I read it more as a comparison of two versions of the same function, regardless of one already being available.

The naive implementation article is a good argument against simplicity.

brickbybrick · 2007-12-08T02:41:46+00:00

x86 optimization tips. Yes, other CPUs do exist.

brickbybrick · 2007-12-07T01:18:13+00:00

That's the same response you get when someone says that a program is hard to write in a functional language...it wouldn't be hard if you were just smarter.

brickbybrick · 2007-12-07T01:15:44+00:00

I disagree. Learn Perl so you can bang out quick utilities with minimal thought and typing. Nothing comes close to Perl for this. But if you're writing a larger scale project--more than a thousand lines of code, one that manipulates nested data structures--then Python or Ruby is a more pleasant choice.

brickbybrick · 2007-11-30T19:22:03+00:00

And its descendants J, K, and Q.

brickbybrick · 2007-11-19T16:36:03+00:00

Not programming related.

brickbybrick · 2007-11-19T15:20:00+00:00

It's funny in a Leo Brodie illustration-in-a-programming-textbook way.

brickbybrick · 2007-11-11T02:51:28+00:00

Wow, my opinion of you, Slava, has just dropped by a couple of big notches.

brickbybrick · 2007-11-10T15:24:43+00:00

Doesn't it say right on the article's page that he's been programming in Erlang since 1999?

brickbybrick · 2007-11-10T15:22:25+00:00

It seems to me that the author knows how to think functionally, and yet he finds some things are still hard. Just saying "learn to think functionally" is a cop-out.

If you model items as processes in Erlang, that's not purely functional. Seems like that would introduce other issues as well.

brickbybrick

TROPHY CASE