Languages Posts

• 06.17.08 JavaScript 2.0, aka ECMAScript 4 (Web, Languages, Computers)

  I just discovered that there is an ECMAScript 4—better known as JavaScript 2.0—in development. As a shameless language slut, I immediately dove into the language overview, and it’s pretty neat.

  This turns JavaScript into a much more useable language, that I could see doing serious development in. I’m well aware that today’s JS isn’t a “toy”, that it’s got an interesting prototype-based object model under the hood; but I’ve found the language so loose as to be difficult to use. This new version adds a full class model, much better support for iteration, a form of generators/coroutines, and more.… MORE

• 04.30.08 Coroutines in Objective-C (Languages, Computers)

  I’ve started using NSOperation in a few places in Cloudy, which means I’m backsliding into using threads and locking and so forth. It definitely makes writing network code easier than Cocoa’s asynchronous API, but I really don’t want to get into a morass of threads.

  What I’d really like to use are Actors. In a nutshell, an Actor is an object that has its own [cooperative] thread and message queue. Actors interact by message-passing instead of shared state. The idea is to eliminate the need for standard synchronization primitives like semaphors and locks, and get rid of the race conditions and deadlocks that plague multi-threaded programs.… MORE

• 03.01.08 MacRuby (Languages, Computers)

  MacRuby “is a version of Ruby that runs on top of Objective-C. More precisely, MacRuby is currently a port of the Ruby 1.9 implementation for the Objective-C runtime and garbage collector. The rationale behind this effort is to solve in a very efficient way all the bridging problems RubyCocoa, the Ruby bridge to the Objective-C runtime, has to work around.” (It’s still in development, and not ready for prime-time use yet.)

  This is exciting news. Now, … MORE

• 02.06.08 Network Barbie Says “Asynchrony Is Hard!” (Ideas, Languages, Computers)

  …Just like many times before, I’m wishing there were a third way between threads and callback-based asynchrony. I’d like to be able to keep each operation’s flow of control simple, as with threads, but at the same time limit the interactions between operations to keep the overall flow of control from turning into race-condition spaghetti.… MORE

• 01.30.08 96 Characters Ought To Be Enough For Anyone (Web, Languages, Computers)

  Paul Graham: “Arc only supports Ascii. … But the kind of people who would be offended by that wouldn’t like Arc anyway.” That last bit [emphasis mine] sort of flummoxed me. Is he saying that LISP only appeals to native English speakers?… MORE

• 05.01.06 your sword is glowing with a faint blue glow (Games, Languages)

  I dabbled in Interactive Fiction, aka Text Adventures, long ago—- I played Adventure on my Apple ][ and Dungeon/Zork on a VAX; I wrote a primitive game in BASIC and later in college partially implemented a language for building games in yacc; and then after graduating, my first serious Mac program was a souped-up and nearly finished version of that language. After that I was too busy with “real” jobs, but others kept the … MORE

• 03.10.06 Signing XML (Social Software, Languages)

  I’d just begun to muse about signing Atom/RSS articles, when Johannes Ernst began blogging about the topic. I had assumed there must be some easy standard way to do it; but the answer turns out to be that there is a standard, but (according to Johannes) it’s far from easy, so much so that it’s nearly unuseable.
  

   (The problem in a nutshell: Digital signatures operate on raw data, so to sign something you have … MORE

• 01.07.06 Just Like The Cool Kids (Me, Languages)

  Like most geeks, as a kid I not only despised the Cool Kids, but also wanted to be one of them too. My own school-age development trajectory took me from a state of total ignorance of what that required[1], to brave attempts to fit in[2], to a realization that different was cool[3].

  Anyway: these days being a Cool Kid is within every geek’s reach. Perhaps that’s because the shared culture has exploded into an uncountable number of fragments, each of which is a tribe with its own parallel hierarchies of coolness. Amen to that.
  … MORE

• 06.29.05 Lesser-known scripting languages (Languages, Humor)

  Just when it seemed, a decade ago, that the programming world had settled on C++ as the lingua franca, the One Language To Rule Them All, instead we got an explosion of new high-level languages that have risen to popularity. Why did this happen? Chiefly because the World-Wide Web has conditioned users to expect five-second delays before any responses to their actions, which provides an environment ideally suited for interpreted, garbage-collected scripting languages. This movement has been encouraged by server vendors like Sun and IBM who are eager to show Web developers the productivity increases they can get by using such languages, especially after they then install massively powerful servers.
  … MORE

• 06.28.05 Lua and unique strings (Ideas, Languages)

  Lua is an interesting scripting language. I can’t say I have much familiarity with it; I’ve only read the book, and a couple of papers, and downloaded and built the interpreter (which takes less than a minute). But what I’ve seen of it gives me a warm feeling, like reading a concise little poem, a haiku. It’s a small language, but what’s there is well-considered, and it appears that you can build bigger things (like … MORE