It's True

Tagged as Linkpost, Personal

Written on 2009-03-28 22:21:35

This is just a quick link post. There may be one or two comments but I'll try to keep my mouth shut and I promise I won't ramble on like an idiot about language preferences. I know I don't write enough code.

Pixar is making another movie called Up and it's out at the end of May, God bless them. I am amazed by the consistent quality stuff they churn out and really can't wait. Trailer here. Watch it!

Also on the entertainment front, I think this is rendered and not real but I wish I could pay money to play it. I spent a large portion of my childhood playing Mega Man 2 so the idea of Mega Man 2.5D is positively awesome.

Via Rafe Colburn: Obsession Times Voice. Makes the point that you should do what you can't help but do, not what you love.

HLint: Personally, I wish every language had a library like this. Hi, let me suggest more idiomatic expressions of your code. Also, the Holumbus developer's blog made me very happy in just one sentence: "There’s no reason why Haskell can’t be used to build distributed systems, so let’s do it." Damn skippy, sir. Damn skippy.

TUNES Learning Lounge: Filled with lots of good stuff.

Dreamsongs by Richard Gabriel: Mob Software. Every now and then I forget about Richard Gabriel. Then I stumble across his work and remember that he's a great thinker. I particularly enjoyed the section on The Changing Face of Software.

I stumbled on the blog of Daniel Lyons, who coincidentally responded to my recent post on where to put the abstractions in CS and had some nice followup questions. He also has a good post on some of the problems with the industry and another post on complexity and languages.

My favorite summary of ILC 2009 so far is Vladimir Sedach's, primarily because of the remarks on patch loading, the commentary around Sussman, and the link to Mob Software reminding me that, sure, parallelism is one problem but Amorphous Computing and long-lived systems provide a whole new bag of interesting problems to start working on. I remember stumbling onto Jacob Beal and Radhika Nagpal's pages a while back. Apparently it's also going by Spatial Computing now and there is a good presentation on it here. Also, who knew Pascal Costanza plays Magic? I might just have to go to one of these Lisp conferences after all. :)

Speaking of Sussman's comments, Jao Ortega has posted for the first time in almost a year on that very subject. He's gone into more depth on Sussman's talks than anyone else I've seen.

One last interesting point that I gathered that Vladimir made explicit from Shivers and Sussman is "that unspecified behaviour actually gave you more opportunity for expressive power" which makes me a little sad. I still haven't decided how I feel about formalism. I need to write more code first. Still, my initial reaction is not exactly positive.

I need to figure out what I think of this later.

Last but not least I've got to mention the work on Unladen-Swallow. The project (which has support from Google) is looking to create a branch of CPython which performs 5 times faster and get it upstream. They've already made a first release with some solid gains and I'll look forward to keeping an eye on them.

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