Michael Fogus's Blog, page 14
October 15, 2012
Phil Bagwell, Rest in Peace
Via the Typesafe blog I learned that Phil Bagwell recently passed away. I met Phil at the 2011 Clojure Conj and had the absolute pleasure to wine and dine with him during the course of the weekend. Four things stand out to me from that time: He had an amazing sense of humor. I was [...]
October 12, 2012
October 9, 2012
Hostiness
The most interesting programming languages moving forward, in my opinion, are languages targeting an existing host platform. Regardless of your opinion of the following languages, I think that the reason for their buzz, power and (eventual?) success is due to their embrace of their host targets: Elixir is a programming language targeting the Erlang virtual [...]
September 29, 2012
Adventures in tearing
An interesting thought exercise is to pull apart ideas that are typically thought inseparable. One could call this act decomplecting,1 but for the purposes of this post I’ll coin the term “adventures in tearing.” A few interesting examples in the wild include: Kernel The Kernel programming language pulls apart function creation into two parts: 1. [...]
September 21, 2012
The Amazing Colossal Science Fiction Ketchup!
Compared to many of my colleagues, friends and hamsters I’ve read a pathetic amount of science fiction in my lifetime. It’s not that I never liked sci-fi, in fact much of what I’ve read I like very much, I just never really got around to it. Therefore, in an effort to “catch-up” I’m taking it [...]
September 7, 2012
Dan Weinreb, Rest in Peace
Dan Weinreb didn’t know me, but I am very familiar and a great admirer of his work. However, one day a few years ago I wrote a blog post entitled “Yegge, Clojure, Arc, and Lolita: or Days of Future Past that generated some very interesting discussion. Among the best pieces of information-dense wisdom, and one [...]
August 23, 2012
Minimum Viable Snippet
Learning a new programming language, library or framework can be difficult. It often takes an incredible amount of patience, time and persistence to properly learn something new and of even moderate complexity. Given this unavoidable commitment, programmers are often reticent to choose one option over another. Granted, programmers looking to transition away from .NET as [...]
August 22, 2012
Phrases Of Maximum Dickery
Phrases of maximum dickery, or PoMD for short, hashtag #pomd:1 Well, actually… Why don’t they just… Why would you ever want to…2 Obviously… As you can see…3 Just read the source… Patches welcomed…4 More? :F I heard this term somewhere but I can’t remember where. Any pointers would be helpful. ↩ This one can take two [...]
August 19, 2012
0th-world Problems
0th-world problems are like first-world problems except only applicable to computerists. Examples include, but are not limited to: Ending relationships due to a fundamental disagreement over whether arrays should be 0, 1 or open indexed. Losing sleep trying to solve the world’s Hacker News ranking algorithm problem. Agonizing over which PLT-related Twitter novelty account is [...]
August 17, 2012
Mentioned by RPG
Ranier Joswig has linked a number of papers suggested by or written by Richard P. Gabriel in the Lisp Sub-Reddit. Although I’ve read a few of those linked, I thought placing the recommendations here would be interesting to my readers, and serve as a personal reminder to study them for research purposes. Howard I. Cannon, [...]
