Posts filed under “programming”
Software Development, Visualized
code_swarm is a fantastic application that visualises software projects over a period of time by analysing their code repositories. It aims to show in a graphical manner the users working on a project, and the number of files committed. Some great example videos are available, including a video of the Apache webserver project. code_swarm
Yahoo! Developer Network site redesign
Useful Javascript/PHP/Ruby resource, with lots of tutorials and code samples... now even prettier Yahoo! Developer Network
"Programmers Wikipedia" Coming Soon
stackoverflow.com is a new project from Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood, intended to be "the anti-experts-exchange (minus the nausea-inducing sleaze and quasi-legal search engine gaming) meets wikipedia meets programming reddit". Worth keeping an eye on...
Java fighting a losing battle
Interesting article from Zend co-founder Andi Gutmans on how the Java world is leveraging dynamic languages such as Ruby and PHP in order to remain relevant in the web application world. The obvious question is, though, whether using JRuby has enough advantages over using Ruby or PHP in a plain Linux environment without a JVM. [...]
I've used Rails. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
Interesting article on how Rails features can be more of a hindrance than a help in many situations. Compared here with Django, which can be cleaner and more lightweight. Some of the bits and pieces that come bundled with Rails are just plain wrong, the Javascript helpers being one example. The abuse of HTTP by [...]
Creator of Ruby on Rails pays backhanded compliment to PHP
David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Rails, praises PHP for being adequate for "small chores". Wow, what a compliment! Perhaps someone should suggest to Dave that Rails is okay too, as long as you don't care about performance. The immediacy of PHP
Creator of ELIZA dies
Joe Weizenbaum, the creator of one of the earliest examples of Artificial Intelligence, has died. Weizenbaum created ELIZA, the "virtual therapist", which I've played around with in various implementations over the years. It inspired me to investigate Lisp, so for that reason alone I hold Weizenbaum in high regard. "A computer will do what you [...]
Investigating Lua
I'm getting involved in an open source Mac project, YMail, and as part of my research I've been checking out Lua. From the Lua homepage, "Lua is a powerful, fast, light-weight, embeddable scripting language." The project is a Mac interface to Yahoo! Mail, and we need a nice way to deal with the mainly text-based [...]
Question
Why are classic computer texts so expensive?