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Most programming languages are created without any theory

The argument is made in this quote that most programming languages are created without any theory, and end up looking for it later, and rarely find it.

Here is the quote from Robin Milner:

Is there any lesson from the research field that you don’t see applied?

Robin: Most programming languages have been desgined without first thinking about the theory on which the meaning would be based. So, very often a language gets designed and implemented, and then what it means, what is supposed to happen when every program is run, is not necessarily predicted. Of course it was in some cases wonderfuly predicted, for example, in ALGOL60; the ALGOL60 report of 1960 was so accurate that one could follow it and find out what was going to happen. This isn’t always the case. Even in the good languages, the formal basis is not there before the language arrives, so what people do is later to retrofit a theory of meaning to the language, and maybe that means that the design could not take advantage of theoretical understanding.

Passion is always a win win situation

Here is a great 5 minute lecture about the nature of pursuing passion. In hindsight, it is always a win win situation.
(via Bruce)

Emulating the CRT for Video Games That Need It

Here is a good article about an effort that was made to make Stella, an Atari 2600 emulator, render the screen according the behavior of a CRT rather than an LCD. The differences are clear, and perhaps more interesting to folks who grew up playing games on such consoles :).
Whatever this case, this must have been an interesting programming problem.

Masterminds of Programming

Masterminds of Programming looks like it might be a fun book to read based on the few revies on LtU so far.
(via LtU)

Muvee Scheme

Muvee Scheme serves as the foundation and scripting engine for muvee Reveal, a personal movie editing program.

Looks like it might be interesting.

(via comp.lang.scheme)

Some Commentary on Lang.NET 2009

Ted, seemingly an open-source/Python focused person, shares his thoughts on Lang.NET 2009 here.

A Maven Dashboard Report Plugin

The basic purpose of “Maven Dashboard Report Plugin” is to centralize and share all quality informations generated by other Maven report plugins

like CheckStyle, PMD, and SureFire.

A Maven Build Number Plugin

This mojo is designed to get a unique build number for each time you build your project.

Of course, you can specify your own format; at least according to the docs.

Bill's Notes on iPhone App Development

Bill posted a bunch of notes here, that, based on what he said, might be interesting for a beginner.

Invasion of the Killer Rodents

Via PLT:

Gerbil is a distributed dialect of scheme implemented as a plt macro language. As such it inherits all the traits of plt-scheme and provides abstractions and libraries for actor-oriented distributed programming.

Documentation here.