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I got into a mild argument about static vs. dynamic typing. I recognize that static typing can be verbose to the point of being repetitious. Take Java generics for example: List<String> astr = new ArrayList<String>(); There really isn’t a great reason why the compiler can’t infer the type of the variable on the right hand [...] Finally, I found something that looks like it could suitably replace LaTeX! It’s called Skribilo and features all of the goodness observed in a previous post about using a Lisp-like syntax instead of that crufty HTML/XML nonsense. I’ve been reading Martin Fowler’s book, Domain-Specific Languages, this weekend. He covered a number of ways in which you can structure your code to achieve what he terms an Internal DSL. Quite a bit is focused on the discussion of a fluent interface. It turns out in many languages there are only so many ways [...] Reddit modded up a nice review of Considerations When Designing your Own Programming/Scripting Language (it’s worth following the links provided there to Clementson’s Blog, to get a larger picture of the issue). There’s really a ton of stuff to think about. Mostly the field of computer science concerns itself with taming complexity. All too often [...] I’ve come across another programming language feature that I would like to have. The last one was a bit outlandish, and I’d really like to refine it a bit. Dress it up a little. Supposing you were asked to perform the well known Dijkstra’s Algorithm. Someone hands you a graph of generic items, let’s call [...] I was reading Steve Yegge’s drunken rant on The Emacs Problem. It wasn’t able to convince me that Lisp was a great language for text processing, but it did convince me that Lisp is a fantastic language for data interchange. Especially, if that data happens to have hierarchical structure. Say for example, something like HTML. [...] I was working on a paper today, and noticed some very peculiar about linguistic gender-neutrality. I know that we are all encouraged to use female character in our examples to combat the inherent chauvinism of the English language. Despite following the recent gender politics over at Less Wrong (summarized by a post on The Nature [...] Yesterday, I had an interesting thought. My advisor once made the cultural observation that many people in Computer Science invent their own language and then immediately write a self-hosting compiler. I agree that a compiler is quite a feat of engineering and serves as a nice test case to demonstrate that the language you’ve invented [...] Guillaume Marceau has used data from the Computer Language Benchmark Game to provide a graphical comparison of many different languages. If you drew the benchmark results on an XY chart you could name the four corners. The fast but verbose languages would cluster at the top left. Let’s call them system languages. The elegantly [...] Last week, I landed on another PhD worthy research project. Given a very large corpus of sentences, such as a digitized version of the Library of Congress, or a less noisy version of the Internet, how can you automatically generate a Thesaurus? At first I thought the problem should be fairly easy, but [...] |
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Copyright © 2012 eric the fruitbat - All Rights Reserved |
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