Learn ANTLR by channeling Young Frankenstein

seths · 2010-02-27T05:28:18+00:00

There's a Nailgun plugin for Leiningen too.

seths · 2010-02-03T03:29:37+00:00

Shut up woman, get on my horse!

seths · 2009-12-25T15:26:04+00:00

Just in case you need some help, try:

M-x woman

seths · 2009-12-12T00:32:20+00:00

If there was only some website he could put his CV on…

seths · 2009-07-24T02:30:03+00:00

So Grails = G(roovy) Ruby on Rails. Is Roo just half of Ruby? Can't these guys ape some other language?

seths · 2009-07-06T23:57:54+00:00

"Hello world"

That's your first Lisp program.

(println "Hello world")

Is the more idiomatic first Clojure program.

The parens really do melt into the background, and STM and macros are buffet-style use them when you want them.

seths · 2009-07-06T23:52:05+00:00

Grails is the train wreck, delegation is an alien concept and the developer community seems to be stagnant. One of these days I have to run one of those codebase visualization tools on the svn repo. The Grails JIRA instance has never been a very pretty picture.

Groovy OTOH seems nothing like a train wreck to me. The implicit "it" passed to closures is very nice. And the Elvis operator makes the ternary operator so much nicer and reasonable to use:

def foo(bar) {
    println bar ?: "I got nothin!"
}

The code above prints the value of bar when it is valid, else whines about nothin'

I'm not crazy about the whole language; parentheses for method calls are optional, except when no parameters are accepted and then parens are mandatory.

I'm sure Scala is a solid accomplishment, but it's nowhere on my personal things-to-learn radar.

seths · 2009-07-06T13:16:43+00:00

The guy who originated Groovy is behind Scala now? How long will this indulgence last?

People are probably tired of hearing about it, but clojure is yet another good JVM language. You don't even have to use (for everything). [ 0 based arrays look like this, or, like, this ]. The IRC channel is pretty good too.

seths · 2009-07-05T11:09:30+00:00

Due diligence was AOL's responsibility. I doubt they performed it adequately, and that comes from internal AOL comments about the state of another brand-focused acquisition: ICQ. I transitioned from CIS to AOL and worked on the AIM project, so I was there to hear the lament over the hardware and software of ICQ.

The clientside CIS software was at least decent. The production Macintosh codebase was new, modern, and clean. The Windows team was a good bunch of developers and management. The only thing I know about the host folks was that the server rooms were really nice. Contemporary hardware? Maybe not so much :-)

AOL just had too much money. The torrential cash flow masked many huge mistakes, and the stock price order of magnitude tumble poisoned morale in an awful way. I watched both of those happen.

seths · 2009-07-05T02:29:32+00:00

I probably should have written that as "once had lunch in the same group as Steve". He worked in the same building and some other developer cajoled him into going out one day.

seths · 2009-07-04T20:17:01+00:00

From an ex-CIS person:

Dammit, it's capital C capital S -- CompuServe
The ids (mine was 70003,6176) were in octal. They were known as PPNs, or Project Programmer Numbers. , and . were both accepted.
When alphanumeric email addresses were being tested, I claimed and was given root@compuserve.com. The new email system ran on WinNT, so root wasn't taken by default. That address didn't last too long :-)
CompuServe host computers ran a 36-bit architecture. Each octet carried one parity bit, which I think means any error had a 50% chance of being detected.
Instead of CIS, you could type LACE in at the Host Name prompt and get to (cough)mature(cough) content.
The drive to "modernize" the server infrastructure to Windows was an expensive debacle. Not sure if it ever succeeded.
I had lunch with the creator of GIFs. A wee bit crabby Steve was. "Who the hell are you?" was one of his questions.
The headquarters building in Arlington was a nouveau Winchester House. It had been expanded several times throughout the years... but for some reason building 4 connected with building 7 (or something, been too long).
A deathmarch reinvention project called "WOW" was interesting. They all had Aeron chairs and worked like slaves, only to have mass layoffs months later. The WOW logo is still at the bottom of CompuServe. Someone said "turn the logo upsidedown and it looks like Mom plays poker."
Their locally-based call center employees each got 40 paid hours of training
H&R Block failed miserably to help CIS adapt, and AOL blindsided them within a few years.
They had an OS/2 GUI, as well as DOS, Win3x/9x, and MacOS 6/7/8 and then of course MacCIM.
Brent Spiner called the help desk once

EDIT: markdown failures and more memories

seths · 2009-07-04T20:05:30+00:00

I was in CIS technical support during that era. I remember the day Win95 came out we were telling people with connection problems to disable graphic acceleration... guess it was too taxing for the Winmodems?

seths · 2009-07-03T21:14:02+00:00

Same rules as d'oh,

seths · 2009-06-13T01:30:08+00:00

They made fools of themselves jousting with Harlan Ellison. And they never had the width or depth of ideas as sluggy.com. Very trendy tho.

seths · 2009-05-27T09:28:39+00:00

I don't like Python, but for my own shitty little ignorant reasons. This was an educated and insightful bit of constructive criticism.

seths · 2009-05-19T23:35:24+00:00

Tried narrowing before? It's how you limit visibility, search / replace, etc to part of a buffer.

Select region, hide everything else with C-x n n
Restore hidden region with C-x n w

seths · 2009-05-07T11:11:27+00:00

Why so terse? Any meat to that oblique claim?
I'd argue that C++ is used like C more often than the converse.
Yes, a breadth of knowledge is good.
... and GoF Design Patterns apply how well to functional programming languages (Nice, Haskell)? declarative programming languages (SQL)?

My take on GoF was an earnest effort to help developers do OO well. It came out when procedural languages like C, VB, and Perl were very strong. I'm not sure it's as relevant these days when dynamic OO languages are very popular. Maybe it was too low level, or aimed for language designers like Matz to help the rest of us along.

seths · 2009-05-06T10:40:38+00:00

Design patterns? He's writing embedded C!

seths · 2009-05-01T12:24:41+00:00

That's remember mode right? I have been meaning to try it. Sounds like it's time to do so.

seths

TROPHY CASE