grant

Never give up

Never, never, never give up.

— Winston Churchill

Generating pretty diffs for LaTeX files

This utility generates pretty diffs for LaTeX files. The example I was was of the 5th draft of R7RS attached to this post. Thanks Alex Shinn for the link.

Chibi likely to be deployed on Android next

Via this thread.

Easily change the backgrounds of iCal and Address Book in OS X 10.7

10.7 introduced “leather bound” iCal and Address Book.
This student’s app changes them back.
Might even donate a little something to him for saving you the trouble.

Chibi Scheme Build for an OS X library and iOS REPL

Meng Zhang set up project files for building Chibi for OS X and an iOS REPL here.
With virtually no iOS knowledge I just checked it out, built it, and ran it on the simulator in a couple of minutes.
Thank you Alex and Meng!
(via chibi-scheme)

The Pioneer plaque

The Pioneer plaques are a pair of gold-anodized aluminium plaques which were placed on board the 1972 Pioneer 10 and 1973 Pioneer 11 spacecraft, featuring a pictorial message, in case either Pioneer 10 or 11 are intercepted by extraterrestrial life. The plaques show the nude figures of a human male and female along with several symbols that are designed to provide information about the origin of the spacecraft.[1]
The Pioneer spacecraft were the first human-built objects to leave the Solar System.

You can buy replicas here.
(via wikipedia)

Hi,
I’m going to work through
http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/BTML/
and
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~lp15/MLbook/
using
http://www.smlnj.org/
SLOWLY over MANY MONTHS.
The reason is that I’ve never learned a statically typed functional programming language, I feel weak on recursive data type definitions, and I am curious about compiler and interpreter construction. So, I’m looking for a way to learn about all 3 at once.
Why ML?

Proven, excellent pedagogical language with great resources.
Smaller than OCaml, F#, and Haskell; so I won’t get distracted with tons of “stuff”
Puts me in a good position if I wanted to use it “for real” that OCaml, F#, Haskell, or even Scala and some other ML in Java languages would be a good follow up path in terms of leveraging the investment.

Basically when I sit down to learn the basics of anything from #2 I feel like they assume you know the basics of ML, and well, I don’t!
Let me know if you want to review problems together.

Whalesong: a Racket to JavaScript compiler

Whalesong is a compiler from Racket to JavaScript; it takes Racket programs and translates them so that they can run stand-alone on a user’s web browser. It should allow Racket programs to run with (hopefully!) little modification, and provide access through the foreign-function interface to native JavaScript APIs. The included runtime library supports the numeric tower, an image library, and a framework to program the web in functional event-driven style.

Author: grant