Author: grant

Lovable code

Today I ended up reading a particular post over at Black Grit, Inc. about their CafePress storefront.

Since mzscheme supports unicode, I would’ve done it like this (in R5RS code): 


(define ♥
  (lambda xs
    (begin
      (display "I ♥ ")
      (let loop ((xs xs))
        (display (car xs))
        (if (not (null? (cdr xs)))
            (begin
              (display " ")
              (display "and ")
              (loop (cdr xs))))))))

so that you could write: 


(♥ ’scheme)

Just 3 little words

On my previous project, we had just a bang-up bunch of guys on the team. Everyone was smart, thoughtful, and worked well together: it was ideal. Since there was no revision control system in place when we arrived for the project, we decided to use Subversion. Since I had championed Subversion, I became both the Subversion system and repository administrator.

After a few months, and few thousand commits (a lot of them without any commit messages) I decided to add a commit hook script to prevent commits without comments. To be fair, I figured that no one would mind being required to write commit messages that were as long as they had already been writing, so I wrote a script to get the mean number of words in the commit messages (to date) that were not empty. The average was 7.

7 is a good number, at least enough to convey the “why” with enough brevity to make the RCS helpful. That said, I figured I would be even more accommodating of the users and require only a mere 3 words in every commit message. I made the change, tested it out, and deployed it to the Subversion server.

Eager to view the informative commit messages that would surely result from this new “feature”, the next day I took at look at the first commit message that followed the change:

“#!@& YOU GRANT”

Thanks guys, you gave me my favorite Subversion story.

How to Learn Scheme (was How to Learn Programming)

  1. The Scheme Programming Language Third Edition by R. Kent Dybvig
  2. How to Design Programs by Matthias Felleisen, Robert Bruce Findler, Matthew Flatt, and Shriram Krishnamurthi
  3. Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman with Julie Sussman

Addendum 6/26/8:
The difference between learning a programming language and learning how to program is now clear enough to me that I had to revise this post to clarify its intent and correct its content. As such, the title has been changed, and only one book has been recommended.