Wisdom And Wonder

Stack Overflow: What did USENET get wrong?

Stack Overflow is:

A language-independent collaboratively edited question and answer site for programmers.

— StackOverflow
It is booming. USENET is not.
What did they do right that USENET got wrong?

Why Be Positive?

Q. Why Be Positive?
A. It beats the alternative!

Opera Doesn't Like to Run for Days

Opera is a great web browser. It is designed to facilitate a pleasant web-browsing experience. It doesn’t seem to like to run for days at a time, though.
On OS X, it has to be forcibly quit every few days or so.

Windows XP is Great

Windows XP is simple, reliable, and extensible. It has served many hundreds of thousands well for many, many years. It serves as a vehicle for businesses to prosper, people to have fun, and students (of all ages) to learn.
Windows XP is great.

Bootstrapping a Mathematics Education

This looks like it would have been a fun introduction, but, its not too late; we can learn more here.
How inspiring. Its stuff like this that changes the world for the better.

Selectively Disabling Tail Recursion

Here is a great article (and piece of code) that addresses one of the few complaints about tail-recursion, the inability to easily collect debugging information. It is just wonderful.

Box2D Lite: A Scheme Physics Engine

(via ikarus)

Box2D is a physics engine written in C++ by Erin Catto:

http://www.box2d.org/

Box2D Lite is a simplified version that he posted to his blog once upon a time.

I’ve ported Box2D Lite to Ikarus. Here it is running the pyramid demo:

http://imgur.com/aXAY4

That’s a screenshot of the very first successful run. 🙂

Of course, I’ll be happy to release the code once the performance is cranked a bit.

Ed

Bertrand Meyer's take on Learning How to Program

Here is Bertrand Meyer’s take on learning how to program.
The site includes a rationale for the teacher, and introduction for the students, and recorded lectures among other things.
Having read OOSC2, it will be interesting to see his philosophy on teaching new programmers.
(via Bertrand Meyer)

A Pattern Repository for Parallel Programming

Here is a repository for parallel programming patterns.
(via pinku)

More Scheme projects I would like to work on

Here are some more fun and/or interesting Scheme projects that I would like to work on (eventually, and in addition to these):

DrScheme: Add line numbers to the editor window
DrScheme: Execute code in editor in another Scheme system
Port SchemeUnit to R6RS Scheme
Scribble the SRFI docs
Write a debt-elimination application
A Scheme API for generating Graphviz diagrams
A Scheme API for managing complex SVN projects
Make Scheme screencasts
Brush up on the PLT Scheme GUI API
Research currency and produce a SRFI for it