tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-92152782009-12-05T10:52:11.811-06:00The happy hour when clarity visitsTrevionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531133885403953227noreply@blogger.comBlogger79125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9215278.post-10376202778730932322009-11-29T20:25:00.003-06:002009-11-29T22:02:49.617-06:00

So apparently there’s a new Haskell standard or something, and I presume the intention is that those of us who do programming languages work and slash or use Haskell on a regular basis should give a shit be concerned about this interesting development. I would like to offer a brief counterargument. First, let’s take a brief look at the new features that Haskell 2010 proposes for the language:

Trevionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531133885403953227noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9215278.post-1963733469298536092008-11-25T13:32:00.002-06:002008-11-25T13:34:45.796-06:00

Many people in the Haskell community use a build-and-packaging library called Cabal. I used Cabal long ago, but that was in a simpler era. These days, I’ve found that a batch file that reads roughly: @ghc –-make –O –hidir obj –odir obj –o target Main.hsworks just as well. However, I’m now part of a larger project in which the other members are using Cabal, and it’s given me an opportunity to

Trevionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531133885403953227noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9215278.post-56273099258727868622008-03-19T02:18:00.002-05:002008-06-21T02:36:22.156-05:00

from Gwen Stefani: "Sometimes it's so hard to find what I'm trying to say. People may think you can turn creativity on and off, but it's not like that." "This shit is bananas! B-A-N-A-N-A-S!" Perhaps she should spend more time in the off position is all I am saying . . .

Trevionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531133885403953227noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9215278.post-30745570259556245652007-11-27T05:34:00.001-06:002007-11-27T05:34:45.636-06:00

There's been some noise on programming.reddit.com recently about a Wall Street Journal story describing how Intel and Microsoft are apparently crushing the OLPC laptop.  According to the WSJ article, Microsoft and Intel have been working together to sell low-priced laptops running standard Windows technologies to developing countries at prices that make them competitive with Mr. Negroponte's OLPC

Trevionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531133885403953227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9215278.post-1664936815358985332007-11-21T20:53:00.000-06:002007-11-21T21:20:03.332-06:00

There's apparently been something of an ongoing spat between Roger Ebert and various people who write about games as to whether games are art. Since Roger Ebert's connections to the games industry are at best tenuous, and from all the evidence I've seen he's never bothered to play one, this seems a bit like his staking out a claim that the Mona Lisa isn't really art.But I suppose that's neither

Trevionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531133885403953227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9215278.post-71691649988035817312007-09-08T22:56:00.001-05:002007-09-08T23:37:49.650-05:00

which I suppose I should qualify by saying that I have relatively little knowledge of his personal life, so my adjective usage is speculative. Recently, the Dartmouth board of trustees has found itself in the unusual position of having to actually live with some of the platitudes they have been mouthing presumably since time immemorial (or at least, since the until today current makeup of the

Trevionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531133885403953227noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9215278.post-5948782298618199252007-05-12T14:18:00.001-05:002007-05-12T14:18:21.604-05:00

It appears that once again, various people are discovering that writing webapps in Ruby with Rails requires fewer keystrokes than writing similar things in Java with Struts and Springs.  While this is hardly a new realization (and is, one could mention, the entire justification for the existance of Rails), they then go on to conclude that the real culprit here is static typing. I address this

Trevionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531133885403953227noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9215278.post-39819120904772701272007-02-22T16:22:00.001-06:002007-02-22T16:29:07.396-06:00

or, Sweet Jesus Why!?, being functional anti-pattern the seventh. This anti-pattern will be presented in the form of a problem, with progressively better solutions until I arrive at a rough approximation of the original code. The problem You are provided with a source figure and a destination figure; both of these are arbitrary polygons. Your goal is to return the heading from the center of mass

Trevionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531133885403953227noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9215278.post-4434085014912327072007-02-22T01:00:00.001-06:002007-02-22T12:07:31.891-06:00

or, I will have none of your State monad, being functional anti-pattern the sixth. Shortly after arriving at my previous employer, I was talking with oen of the senior developers, and some piece of state passing code came up. Having recently discovered the exciting world of the Monad Transformer Library, I said, eagerly, "Oh, are you using the State monad for that?" To which he replied, "No,

Trevionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531133885403953227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9215278.post-49029128380065049392007-02-19T00:25:00.001-06:002007-02-21T17:05:17.050-06:00

or, playing to your weaknesses, being functional anti-patterns the fourth and fifth. While I was somewhat occupied collecting the code samples that made up functional anti-patterns the first through third, I was being paid primarily to develop, extend and maintain a package I'll call Snowball[1]. Snowball was a somewhat grand undertaking, mainly consisting of everything we needed and would hope

Trevionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531133885403953227noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9215278.post-1278162878794946492007-01-26T11:40:00.001-06:002007-01-26T12:11:51.860-06:00

being those ways not to construct a software industry, or, some consequences of time spent in handbaskets. (Incidentally, I have fooled with a comments widget, but it doesn't seem to actually go the to appropriate comment quite yet. I'm not sure why not.) Some time ago I ranted at some length and some heat about the state of software development - or, to be exact, about a particular approach to

Trevionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531133885403953227noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9215278.post-83381862388665827172006-12-04T18:53:00.001-06:002006-12-04T18:53:18.694-06:00

or, but what if it were a snoc-list, being functional anti-pattern the third. A long time ago, when I was a freshman in college, I took a course on functional programming.  There was a problem on the first exam involving various list operations and drawing pictures of the resulting structures.  I had put no effort into learning the actual underpinnings of the list operations and was quite

Trevionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531133885403953227noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9215278.post-20764364628819293042006-11-10T19:55:00.001-06:002006-11-10T19:57:03.230-06:00

being anti-pattern the second. Unlike (or not), I spent some time being an accidental practitioner of functional pointers myself.  For my senior thesis (which is probably quite the source of anti-patterns if I would go back and look at the code) I had developed a small graph library.  This library had predictable types like Vertex and Edge and it also had a type called Graph and there was at this

Trevionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531133885403953227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9215278.post-57006949635070125752006-11-09T19:38:00.001-06:002006-11-10T02:31:44.348-06:00

which I will be talking about shortly, but first I need to admit that for the past several years I have been quite wrong. It has been my (oft-expressed to anyone who would give even the semblance of listening) opinion that programming languages like Haskell are a Very Good Thing; that by making it natural to express algorithms in a way closer to the mathematics underlying their formal models, it

Trevionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531133885403953227noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9215278.post-1147807436008783932006-05-16T14:11:00.000-05:002006-05-16T14:23:56.026-05:00

I fail to see the problem with it sounding like everything Tool has ever done.And in a nutshell, that captures most of the things that can be said about Tool's new album, 10000 Days. The album is not a major step forward for the band; they do very little that they haven't done before, or at least suggested before. Maynard's lyrics are mixed further into the background than they have been on the

Trevionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531133885403953227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9215278.post-1144127125148852392006-04-03T23:14:00.000-05:002006-04-04T00:05:25.226-05:00

So here are some notes on some that I've seen recently. Hopefully I'll get back into the habit of writing...Closer is phenomenal, which is more than I ever thought I'd say about a movie with Julia Roberts in it. This was also the first movie to alert me to the presence that Natalie Portman can, despite all evidence presented in Star Wars, act, and that George Lucas is not just a bad director,

Trevionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531133885403953227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9215278.post-1137561646052268332006-01-17T23:20:00.000-06:002006-01-17T23:21:43.986-06:00

I normally hate people who do this, but the more people who see this site, the better off the world will be.You were supposed to click that link, dammit.

Trevionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531133885403953227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9215278.post-1132113374779032382005-11-15T21:15:00.001-06:002005-11-17T22:52:55.540-06:00

There seem to be two completely divergent perspectives on programming languages and tools: one, coming primarily from industry, is currently focused primarily on "conventional" (i.e., not Smalltalk) object oriented languages, XML, XML-based frameworks, visual basic, SQL, etc. The other, coming primarily from academia, focuses primarily on research languages like SML, OCaml, Scheme, Haskell, etc.,

Trevionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531133885403953227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9215278.post-1127633882901426012005-09-25T03:17:00.000-05:002005-09-25T02:38:02.906-05:00

Actually, that's a bit of an overstatement. I've only heard three songs, and while American Idiot is almost painfully trite and I change the station the second I realize that Wake Me When September Ends is coming, they're not worth a 'blog post. On the other hand Boulevard of Broken Dreams manages to be both trite and completely meaningless, all at the same time, and I think that's probably

Trevionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531133885403953227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9215278.post-1126497673030060722005-09-11T22:28:00.000-05:002005-09-12T10:10:27.826-05:00

PointYou may have seen this blog post before — it was linked from Slashdot. Its author demonstrates the other kind of backwards thinking that perpetuates computer science/software engineering today. He's not overly concerned, at least in that post, with management techniques, models, waterfalls, etc. Instead, he's deeply concerned that computer science graduates these days haven't taken courses

Trevionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531133885403953227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9215278.post-1126335002086556762005-09-10T01:39:00.000-05:002005-09-10T01:54:24.450-05:00

More linkage over yonder; should be decent if the guy updates for more than four updates.I watched M. Night Shyamalan's movie Unbreakable tonight; I've seen Signs before, and while I haven't seen The Sixth Sense I've heard the plot twist and that somewhat takes away the impetus to see it.It's become, at least in some circles, vogueish to dislike Shyamalan's movies. The criticisms leveled — that

Trevionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531133885403953227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9215278.post-1126265096977146792005-09-09T06:03:00.000-05:002005-09-09T06:29:14.080-05:00

In the comments to a previous entry, Michael suggested that you might, in fact, get a better preparation to be a software engineer in lower tier schools because, summarizing and giving them the benefit of the doubt, their programs are more likely to focus on methods of development being widely used in the business world at the moment.On the face of it, this might not seem particularly

Trevionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531133885403953227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9215278.post-1125377440782157672005-09-05T01:05:00.000-05:002005-09-05T02:02:05.370-05:00

Several definitions will be necessary for the enjoyment of this post:IT: Information Technologies. A department/division/branch of a U.S. corporation responsible for accomplishing things with computers and, as I will elaborate, generally failing. Corporations outside the United States probably have IT departments as well, but I don't know anything about them so I'm going to exclude them from

Trevionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531133885403953227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9215278.post-1125296655077942212005-08-29T00:54:00.000-05:002005-08-29T01:24:15.113-05:00

(Warning: this entry might very possibly spoil bits of Chuck Palahniuk's novel Haunted.)My exposure to Chuck Palahniuk consists of Survivor, Choke, the movie of Fight Club and most recently Haunted. I saw Fight Club long after most people did — in the summer of 2003 to be exact — and long after it had passed from "really cool man" to "trite" in most people's eyes, but I was always a late bloomer

Trevionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531133885403953227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9215278.post-1125128874747951542005-08-27T02:47:00.000-05:002005-08-27T18:33:10.226-05:00

I should start out by mentioning that there's a new link over in the Elsewhere section and I strongly recommend clicking upon it.Someday I'll actually get around to writing about Cleansed, and it will either be the greatest thing I've ever written or something like "It's been a long time" which at the time was a significant step for me and afterwards I look back on as being quaint but ultimately

Trevionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531133885403953227noreply@blogger.com0