Posted by Ben
Thu, 19 Oct 2006 07:01:15 GMT
Here’s my very incomplete notes of Matz’s presentation at the BYU CS Department. I stopped taking notes toward the end. I hope they post pdfs of the slides he used.
It looked like they were recording the presentation, so maybe we’ll get video.
Matz 18 October 2006
So many languages: 4000 years ago (Babel)
“It is the source of my suffer.” but we can compare languages.
English v Japanese:
- totally different syntax
- rich ways to express respect
- thousands of characters
- need no icons
Purpose of Languages:
- describe facts
- express thoughts/feeling
- think in
Languages are not only tools to communicate, but also tools to think.
Language determines the way we think. It influences human thoughts more than we think.
So, does this rule apply to programming languages?
Since we think in programming languages, the programming language must have influence on our thoughts.
What is a good language?
- helps human thought
- makes the programming experience better
“Ruby doesn’t focus on run-time efficiency at all”
“Ruby focuses on cost of programming, programmer productivity.”
Ruby has an easy to remember syntax, and looks like other programming languages (familiar).
Ruby = Smalltalk – Unfamiliar syntax
+ perl’s scripting power
+ python’s exception etc.
+ CLU’s iterator
+ a lot more good things
Pure OOPL
Matz created ruby so that programming would be fun. Usability is the focus.
“Easy things should be easy. Hard things Should be possible.”
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Posted by Ben
Thu, 08 Sep 2005 11:08:00 GMT
Wow, I just found a firefox extension that’s going to make it a lot easier to see what’s going on in poorly-written html.
Check it out:
http://jennifermadden.com/scripts/ViewRenderedSource.html
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Posted by Ben
Sun, 14 Aug 2005 10:58:00 GMT
I’m now running the latest version of Typo for my blog software. This new version came with a new template, so the look has changed a little.
As a reader of the blog you probably won’t see a whole lot of changes other than a slight tweak of the look, but in the admin area this blog software really rocks.
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Posted by bytheway
Tue, 03 May 2005 11:10:00 GMT
As some of you probably know, I’ve become quite a fan of the programming language Ruby recently, specifically because of the RubyonRails project. I’m acutally using rails right now to write a sort of issue tracker for my department at work.
In any case, the guys originally behind much of the Rails magic have a new site coming online tomorrow called BackPack that looks to be a sort of reduced version of their popular project management site Basecamp.
I was curious, so I signed up to be notified when it launched, with the chance to be given a golden ticket to see the site early. Well, I got my golden ticket this afternoon, and have had a chance to poke around a bit.
I haven’t really had the chance to dig deep into the site, but I was very impressed at the extensive, and very appropriate use of AJAX (asynchronous javascript and xmlhttprequest for the web geeks out there. for the non-geeks its the technology behind google maps and google suggest). I loved being able to edit and add things to the site without having to reload whole pages. It made the whole user experience more friendly and working with the site that way is much faster than waiting for full page reloads.
The basic function of the site, as I see it, is to be a personal management tool, which allows you to make to do lists, leave notes, files, etc. I’ll have to play around a bit more to know if such a model really works, but I have a feeling that after a while I’ll be wishing I had a side project or two to justify subscribing.
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