The Myth of the Muttering Madman: September 2009

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Awesome Programming Language resource

Wowsers. I just stumbled across this awesome programming language resource:

http://merd.sourceforge.net/pixel/language-study/syntax-across-languages/Fnctn.html

Then I went back up to this:

http://merd.sourceforge.net/pixel/language-study/syntax-across-languages/ (double wow)

Then I went back up to this:

http://merd.sourceforge.net/pixel/language-study etc etc.

So, all in all, http://merd.sourceforge.net/pixel and related pages is very very interesting indeed!

Free Your Twitter

A very quick and dirty Perl script to export your Twitter. No need to critique the script, I know it can be improved :)


$ cat free_your_twitter.pl 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use Modern::Perl;
use Net::Twitter;
use YAML qw(Dump);
use Carp qw(croak);


my $t = Net::Twitter->new(username => 'snarkyboojum',
                          password => 'yourpassword');

my @export_msgs;

for my $i (1..80) {
    my $msgs = $t->user_timeline( {page => $i, count => 200} );
    push @export_msgs, @$msgs;

    last if (scalar @$msgs < 200);
}

open my $fh, '>', 'twitter_dump.yml'
    or croak "Can't open file for twitter dump: [$!]\n";

print $fh Dump(@export_msgs);

close $fh;

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Lispyness

Ooh-aah ;)

The contrast between function and procedure is a reflection of the general distinction between describing properties of things and describing how to do things, or, as it is sometimes referred to, the distinction between declarative knowledge and imperative knowledge. In mathematics we are usually concerned with declarative (what is) descriptions, whereas in computer science we are usually concerned with imperative (how to) descriptions.

1.1.7 Example: Square Roots by Newton's Method from Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs.