Category: Programming

Why Ruby is an acceptable LISP

Eric Kidd has an interesting post entitled "Why Ruby is an acceptable LISP". As it turns out, Ruby compares well as a functional language, and it fakes macros better than Iâ€™d thought.... Now, given a choice between a...

Programming

Static typing vs. dynamic typing

Michael Feathers has an interesting post: Is Static Typing a Form of Bad Coupling? To me, it's a tradeoff between error checking and flexibility. Error checking takes on greater importance in shrink wrap software and libraries...

ProgrammingPythonRuby

Screencast presentation comparing J2EE, RoR, Zope, TurboGears, and Django

Interesting presentation that compares how these frameworks fare against each other for very simple web apps. Video and discussion at Joel on Software

DebianLinuxPythonUbuntu

Fixing “invalid Python installation” error on Ubuntu

While attempting to install DenyHosts, I got an error about "invalid Python installation". I found the solution here. Basically just: sudo apt-get install python2.4-dev...

GtDPython

My funky Pythony Unix GtD system

Back in December, I talked about PyGTD and mentioned that I'd been messing around with my own homebrew system. To be honest, I haven't been using it regularly lately (self-flagellation), but a few people have asked about it, so I...

ProgrammingRuby

Multiple dispatch in Ruby

I've been reading recently about Common Lisp and CLOS and I've been intrigued by their radically different approach to OO and some of their interesting features, one of which is multiple dispatch. Most mainstream OO languages...

Common LispProgramming

Accessing C functions from CLISP

It's pretty impressive how easy it is to call C functions from Lisp, once you know the proper FFI voodoo. For example, this is how I accessed the standard C library function time from CLISP on my Linux system. (ffi:def-call-out...