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Why I love Lisp
This post was extracted from a small talk I gave at Simplificator, where I work, titled “Why I love Smalltalk and Lisp”. There’s another post titled “Why I love Smalltalk” published before this one. Lisp is an old language. Very old. Today there are many Lisps and no single language is called Lisp today. Actually,…
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The joyful Clojure example code convention
I started reading The Joy of Clojure, seems like a great book and I like its example code convention. I’m documenting it here because I’ll adopt it on my blog and I want to be able to link to it. I’ll call it the joyful Clojure example code convention. A simple piece of Clojure code looks like…
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Why I love Smalltalk
This post was extracted from a small talk I gave at Simplificator, where I work, titled “Why I love Smalltalk and Lisp”. There should be another post, “Why I love Lisp” following this one. After I learned my basic coding skill in more or less traditional languages, like C, C++, Python, there were four languages…
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Getting rid of RubyGems deprecation warnings
A recent update to RubyGems is causing a lot of deprecation warnings like these: I generally like software to move forward and the way to do that is deprecate and then after a while, make backwards incompatible changes. It’s painful but there’s no other way. I do have a problem with all the cron jobs…
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Metaprogramming Ruby
There are thousands of books that will take you from illiterate to novice in any programming language. But finding those that will take you from novice or intermediate to expert is hard. I remember reading Effective Java some years ago and wishing I had something like that for Python. I’ve never found one. Metaprogramming Ruby…
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Are dynamic languages just a temporary workaround?
This can unleash so much hate mail, but here it goes, my inbox is ready! Are dynamic languages just a temporary workaround? I’m not sure! I’m switching between the two types of languages all the time: Java, Python, C#, JavaScript. I’ll try to make the long story short. Statically typed languages, like Java and C#, are nice…
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Formating strings in C#, like in Python
I like Python’s way to format strings because you can use it everywhere, it’s part of the strings. You can do print(“Welcome %s!” % user.name) as you can do Console.Writeln(“Welcome {0}!”, user.Name) But then in Python you can also do randomMethodThatTakesAString(“Welcome %s!” % user.name) In C# it gets trickier, because the call to Console.Writeln takes…
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Complexity of writing software
There seems to be a lot of discussion about software complexity, and although I think many people are talking about different stuff, here’s my take on it. We often compare writing software with other professional disciplines, like civil engineering and medicine, which allows us to pick at possible futures of writing software. I believe writing software…
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File input for forms in ASP.NET MVC
I’m not sure why ASP.NET MVC was shipped without a file input type for forms. Maybe it’ll come in MVC 2.0 or 3.0. Meanwhile, I created one. I spent two or three hours trying to figure out how to go from Object to IDictionary<String, Object> to follow the same ASP.NET MVC style where you have…
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Music for coding
I’ve been looking for ages for the perfect music for coding. I’ve asked around and tried new age, Mozart, Bach, and other academic music. I’ve tried instrumental soothing music and instrumental electronic music. Nothing worked until I started to expand my original coding music: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Yes, I used to code…