Programming – Page 20 – Wisdom And Wonder

A history of macro systems

This is a great post explaining the history of macro systems.

Scheme Boston

Scheme Boston is a group of Scheme users who are located in and around Boston, Massachusetts. The group meets monthly, more or less, and usually on the third Wednesday of the month.

Programming with Functional Objects in Scala

At the JavaOne 08 presentation “Programming with Functional Objects in Scala”, Scala‘s creator Martin Odersky summed up Scala’s mission statement for the audience:

Scala is the perfect mixture of Object Oriented (OO) and Functional Programming (FP). You get the flexibility of FP along with the familiarity of OO; along with the awesome power of the Actor model. Combine that will full speed execution on the JVM (in contrast to JRuby for example) along with seamless integration with existing Java libraries and you’ve got a platform that is tough to beat”.

Well said Martin.

Exposing the Depth JDK 7.0 Applications with DTrace

“Exposing the Depth JDK 7.0 Applications with DTrace” was the only lab that I attended at JavaOne 08. As you can imagine, it was all about dtrace.

dtrace is a no-overhead, highly dynamic, powerful programming language used to report on running systems. It runs on Solaris, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, and sorely neither Linux nor AIX (the two latter camps will roll their own clones on this one).

The tool itself is really delightful; in the right hands it can really work wonders.

I wish we had this on Windows, Linux, OS/400, and AIX.

Monar 0.0.1 released

Monar is a free interpreter for R6RS Scheme.

Currently it covers a little of R6RS core scheme, utf-8 I/O, quasiquote, apply , regexp , traditional macro, 30bit fixnum , simple port , simple CGI and format.

And Wiki works on Monar@FreeBSD+Apache.

http://monar.monaos.org/wiki/LambdaWiki

Downloads and More Information

Source code and Monar documentation can be found on the web at:

http://code.google.com/p/monar/

(via comp.lang.scheme)

GNU Guile 1.8.5 Released

This release includes: improved I/O performance, an object-based traps infrastructure, bug fixes, and other changes.

This is primarily a bugfix release.

(via PLNews)

Choosing random files in Bash

Ben has a good post about choosing random files in Bash:


ls | while read x; do echo "`expr $RANDOM % 1000`:$x"; done \
     | sort -n| sed 's/[0-9]*://' | head -15

Scheme2Js

is a Scheme to JavaScript compiler distributed under the GPL license

It is particularly interesting in that it is utilized by the HOP web framework.

(via PLNews)

Consider MrED

Ben recommends that when you need to write a GUI app, you should consider MrED.

Halyard 2D/3D multimedia engine

[Dartmouth’s] Interactive Media Lab (IML) builds shrink-wrapped educational software for medical professionals and first responders. [They] have teams focusing on media production, script-level authoring, and low-level engine development.

They have released their engine, along with their object system, as open source.

Their system is pretty interesting in that they tackled a lot of problems on their own; and even after solving problems they still had to figure how to get the users to use the new code! Read about it in the write-up on CUFP 07.