Category: Link

Coding for Humans: Annotated Code View in an IDE

Here is a post where Jordan explains what he wants to accomplish in the DrScheme IDE; basically he wants to be able to customize code in the IDE by annotating it, allow the annotations to be displayed only, while having the code run in mzscheme as expected.
Here is a screencast that he made which demonstrates his goal.
Very interesting!
(via plt)

A Dan Weinreb talk about enterprise software, Lisp, and Scheme

Here is a good talk by Dan Weinreb about enterprise software, Lisp, and Scheme. Here are some parts that I found interesting:

  • “There must be some really hard problem that we can profitably solve”: Generally good advice from a group of PhD students looking to apply their expertise who would go on to start up Dan’s employer.
  • “Sometimes syntax does matter”: Indeed!
  • They use Clozure CL for their new app; and SBCL for their old one.
  • “[We] provison for static type checking: we have macros to do checking, and also for defining functions that are typed. We use them at major module interfaces.” Dan’s reply when asked if they use static type checking anywhere in the system. This is how PLT’s contract system works.
  • The ILC ’09 videos will get posted; seriously.
  • PLT Scheme kudos were given.
  • The future of Lisp is unifying the efforts of Common Lisp and Scheme.
  • That unification might very well come on the JVM (good libs, large investment in runtime).

Still wondering why only five people showed up for this talk (excluding Norvig).
(via tc-lispers)

What Is Computational Science

Computational science (or scientific computing) is the field of study concerned with constructing mathematical models and numerical solution techniques and using computers to analyse and solve scientific, social scientific and engineering problems. In practical use, it is typically the application of computer simulation and other forms of computation to problems in various scientific disciplines.

— Wikipedia

Google Android's Teaching Platform Built on Scheme

[W]e hope to do the following:
* Make mobile application development accessible to anyone.
* Enhance introductory learning experiences in computing through the vehicle of Android’s open platform.
* Encourage a community of faculty and students to share material and ideas for teaching and exploring.

Part of our development environment is a visual programming language similar to Scratch. The visual language provides a drag-and-drop interface for assembling procedures and event handlers that manipulate high-level components of Android-based phones.

We parse the visual programming language into an S-expression intermediate language, which is a domain-specific language expressed as a set of Scheme macros, along with a Scheme runtime library.

(via Google[2] via Google[1] via PLT)