Slashdot Mirror

If you were a vi/Vim user, then Vimperator. It's Firefox with the totally rational key-bindings Vim users like me expect.

Emacs users can use Conkeror instead. This blog post is a pretty neat intro to Conkeror.

Looks like Conkeror has what Vimperator calls hinting - in Vimperator you hit f or F (for new tab hinting) and it labels all the links on the screen with a number. You type in the number you want and it opens it. M-l does the same in Conkeror.

One of the nice things I like in Vimperator is that you can write (in JavaScript, thankfully, not VimL) really simple plugins and remaps. There's a plugin you can get which makes it so you can use the :shorten command and it takes the URL of the current page, shortens it through $URL_SHORTENER_OF_YOUR_CHOICE and then yanks (that is, copies to the system pasteboard) the result. Or if you want to yank just the current URL, you can tap "y".

Firefox extensions that make Firefox like editors almost makes the GUI usable. Vimperator is certainly very cool on a small netbook as it really helps getting all the GUI clutter out of the way.

It's not a claim:

JavaScript Programming Language: The language everyone loves to hate

Javascript and LISP

Douglas Crockford's page on Javascript

As far as your last point regarding how Javascript is being widely taught and used, all it states is a major problem with the way the language is understood. Just because a language is taught a certain way doesn't mean that the language IS that way. If you delve deeper into Javascript you'll see that it's more like lisp and less like C or Java.

Lisp is particularly suited to this sort of thing.

Here's an example http://bc.tech.coop/blog/050711.html

• FOUR links to olpcnews (Intel) . That's the equivalent to using fox news as a reference during the US elections...
• The news bit is coming 3 months later? wtf
• There are known fixes, and you can actually buy yourself an USB keyboard, which you should have done if you are freaking rich geek adult buying something with keyboard designed for kids.
• The summary mentions no support infraestructure as a reason for not believing it could succeed on undeveloped countries, it fails to mention there is such a thing on the target countries.
• No figures, no statistics, the summary is implying the problem is widespread and everyone is suffering from it, but no data.
• 1 month fix?
• The final phrase on the summary, man it is terrible, thanks slashdot, I am tagging this "firehoseabuse"

Look here.

At the same workshop, Joe Armstrong gave a presentation on "Concurrency Oriented Programming in Erlang" (see presentation, view video). In it, he illustrated how Erlang, with its built-in support for lightweight processes and extremely fast process creation, was far superior to either Java or C# in its ability to quickly create new processes. In fact, when an Erlang-based web server was compared to Apache (comparing KBytes/sec vs session load), the ability of Erlang to effectively support many concurrent, parallel processes meant that the Erlang-based web server was able to run over 80,000 sessions while the Apache web server died at around 4,000 sessions.

The first thing I thought of when I read this article is the famous 'ctrl-alt-del' keyboard. Originally a dig at MS and their OS and needing to restart it etc I guess.

I'd like to produce some demos for my friends and coworkers a la the outstanding Slime video you can find on this page.

Some programs provide a very powerful working environment but leave new users wondering, "How am I supposed to use these features to get something done?" A video is the best answer.

video : big powerful program :: code examples : big complex API

It's basically a mathematics-oriented language, and mostly useless for most things outside of that. An interesting intellectual exercise for geeks, useful if you're a mathematician, and that's about it.

Amoung others, Naughty Dog use a customised version of LISP called GAOL(Game Action Oriented Lisp). It was used extensively on Jak 2, one of the most impressive games on the PS2, or indeed any console.

As the link mentions, the "difficulty" of Lisp, has lead to its sidelining all too often. The fact is, it is a very, very powerful language and definitely worth a look given the obstacles modern game programmers are running up against.

A bit off-topic? I found some recent readings about the future of processing technology, and developments in software to exploit this, to be quite interesting.

Man, I gotta go find out why multithreading is so hard. Gotta try and get back into it someday and have a play around, get to truly understand it. I've only played with "Intro to Threads" type programs in Java, so there should be plenty for me to learn, when I get there...

In the mean time, there's a lot of things to look at for someone lazy like me. If I'm not gonna do them, I can read about them first. My favourite starting points have got to be (many Lisp related): Bill Clementson's blog. Erlisp (because I don't know Erlang itself, so Lispy Erlang would be a good way to understand the concepts I feel). Short explanation here. There's Erlang itself, but don't forget all the others: MapReduce, Termite (quite simple & beautiful code) and cl-muproc (all on the second link above).

Once (is it if or when?) single processors riding on Moore's Law stop working, is there no escape from concurrent programming? Looks like Erlang (currently being "borged" into Lisp, yay) is where the action is gonna be if massively multithreaded architecture turns out to be the winner for parallel/concurrency/distributed computing.

A bit off-topic? I found some recent readings about the future of processing technology, and developments in software to exploit this, to be quite interesting.

Man, I gotta go find out why multithreading is so hard. Gotta try and get back into it someday and have a play around, get to truly understand it. I've only played with "Intro to Threads" type programs in Java, so there should be plenty for me to learn, when I get there...

In the mean time, there's a lot of things to look at for someone lazy like me. If I'm not gonna do them, I can read about them first. My favourite starting points have got to be (many Lisp related): Bill Clementson's blog. Erlisp (because I don't know Erlang itself, so Lispy Erlang would be a good way to understand the concepts I feel). Short explanation here. There's Erlang itself, but don't forget all the others: MapReduce, Termite (quite simple & beautiful code) and cl-muproc (all on the second link above).

Once (is it if or when?) single processors riding on Moore's Law stop working, is there no escape from concurrent programming? Looks like Erlang (currently being "borged" into Lisp, yay) is where the action is gonna be if massively multithreaded architecture turns out to be the winner for parallel/concurrency/distributed computing.

A bit off-topic? I found some recent readings about the future of processing technology, and developments in software to exploit this, to be quite interesting.

Man, I gotta go find out why multithreading is so hard. Gotta try and get back into it someday and have a play around, get to truly understand it. I've only played with "Intro to Threads" type programs in Java, so there should be plenty for me to learn, when I get there...

In the mean time, there's a lot of things to look at for someone lazy like me. If I'm not gonna do them, I can read about them first. My favourite starting points have got to be (many Lisp related): Bill Clementson's blog. Erlisp (because I don't know Erlang itself, so Lispy Erlang would be a good way to understand the concepts I feel). Short explanation here. There's Erlang itself, but don't forget all the others: MapReduce, Termite (quite simple & beautiful code) and cl-muproc (all on the second link above).

Once (is it if or when?) single processors riding on Moore's Law stop working, is there no escape from concurrent programming? Looks like Erlang (currently being "borged" into Lisp, yay) is where the action is gonna be if massively multithreaded architecture turns out to be the winner for parallel/concurrency/distributed computing.

Marco is the author of Uncommon Web, a continuation based lisp framework for web applications.

Last week he did a video for that, torrent here that was well received. It's still in the early stages, but combined with Lisp-on-Lines (in development) it's hopefully going to attract some mindshare.

Bill Clementson also discusses lisp webserver options in his (slighty dated - Oct-2004) blog entry

I started working with UCW/Slime/mod_lisp a couple of weeks ago, and I'm pleased to see better getting started videos, ala Ruby on Rails.

Marco is the author of Uncommon Web, a continuation based lisp framework for web applications.

Last week he did a video for that, torrent here that was well received. It's still in the early stages, but combined with Lisp-on-Lines (in development) it's hopefully going to attract some mindshare.

Bill Clementson also discusses lisp webserver options in his (slighty dated - Oct-2004) blog entry

I started working with UCW/Slime/mod_lisp a couple of weeks ago, and I'm pleased to see better getting started videos, ala Ruby on Rails.

The quite recent video at http://bc.tech.coop/blog/050711.html
should have been mentioned as well. It shows how to develop in lisp - atleast a short example.

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Because those other languages are terrible at web programming. I program Common Lisp web applications for a living, and i've found it to be the best tool for the job. I'm into Continuation based web programming now (rather than the ad-hoc finite-state-machine model), and you can add CPS transformation to CL with a few macros.

PHP, Perl, etc are all a little slow when compared to (a native compiled) Lisp as well. The cliki i run at http://lisp.tech.coop/ was slashdotted this morning. It runs under araneida ( a lisp based web server) and SBCL. It does not use threads or fork processes, but does all the work in a single process using SERVE-EVENT (which is like unix select()).

So, a single lisp process can handle a minor slashdotting (on a UML instance with 128 mb ram). That seems like a good reason to try lisp.

http://lisp.tech.coop/Web%2fContinuation might give you some idea as to the power of lisp for web programming. I suggest you give CL a try. if you are looking for a better way to write web applications, lisp may just be for you

I'm not a fan of SICP, but you may enjoy the video lectures.

My issue with SICP is it doesn't teach things like errorhandling or macros, and is very recursion-heavy. But others enjoy it, so YMMV.

Try here

I've been reading this site since it was chips n dip, but this is the first time i've ever felt the need to comment.

I can't believe that any developer could write and code without some knowlege of ASM. Disclaimer: I'm self-educated, so have no bias except my own.

More importantly, if you don't know ASM and can't understand machine language, you'd never get through Knuth's tome "The Art Of Computer Programming".

In my opinion, this is the most important work ever written in our field. Any developer worth his/her salt should have at least read and understood these books, and completed at least the simple exercises.

the examples in tAoCP are written in machine language for a fictional machine, but the depth one learns by reviewing what that machine does with its data is important in any project.

I've never programmed professionally in ASM. infact, i usually work in Perl/PHP/Python. But i would not be able to write quality code in those languages if my mind was not constantly thinking of the machine. After all, i'm a computer programmer, not a linguist or scientist.

Not knowing assembly, or at least having some idea as to how a computer processor works, would make a programmer useless in my eyes. leave them to Access or VBA, and leave the coding to us pro's :)

I beleive that ASM should be taught first. If you can't understand ASM, you'll neer be a good programmer, so why bother learning Java/C++ or whatever? would you trust a doctor who didn't know how the body works?