A new perl.org

A new design, complete with rewritten content for www.perl.org! Looks fantastic!

Joyful Perl 6

I was reading through the source code for proto over a beer this evening and came across this:



That's some serious Joy :)

Clojure: first contact

$ java -cp clojure-1.0.0.jar clojure.lang.Repl
Clojure 1.0.0-
user=> (+ 1 2 3)
6
user=> (. javax.swing.JOptionPane(showMessageDialog nil "Hello World"))
nil
user=>

Ooh ah! :D

Tired old monopolies...

I'm sick and tired of tired, old monopolies delivering me webpages like:

http://content.digitalwell.washington.edu/msr/external_release_talks_12_05_2005/14072/unsupported.htm.

All I wanted to do was view what looked like a very interesting presentation on software development at http://www.researchchannel.org/prog/displayevent.aspx?fID=569&rID=9490.

I'm not going to even try to watch this now.

There's too much other good stuff out there.

Lawyers patenting precedents :D

"What would happen if lawyers would take out a patent on all the precedents every time they win a case, and someone cites that case, they have to pay a license fee to them, and so on..." - Donald Knuth.

Great line :)

From Questions Answered.

N.B. quote above is roughly paraphrased based on the video (link above).

Steve Jobs demos Apple Macintosh, 1984

Just read Why's Poignant guide. Last 3 or 4 pages were particularly poignant (yep) given his recent disappearance.

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;

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.