Programming – Page 14 – Wisdom And Wonder

Dynamic Languages Wizards Series

While I haven’t watched these yet; they do sound interesting.
(via dhess)

The aim of a language

to turn ideas into software, quickly and faithfully

— John Chambers
Great aim!

A Pattern Repository for Parallel Programming

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

Conway's Law

Conway’s Law is not intended to be a joke or nasty witticism:

…organizations which design systems … are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.

— Melvin Conway
(via Fare via Wikipedia)

Elastic tabstops

The argument: Code an in editor should be dynamically formatted using something like intelligent table-based layouts.
Seems like an OK idea. Read about it here.

A Few N900 Coding Tutorials

There are currently 4 tutorials on writing different kinds of apps here.
(via reddit).

Mitch Wand Symposium Slides are Up

Most of the slides from the Mitchfest talks are now available; linked here.
(via the little calculist)

When it Comes to R7RS; R6RS Users are Quiet

R6RS users don’t seem to have much to say about R7RS. Most R6RS users seem to happy with Scheme and busy using it rather than worrying about how it should be split into two parts (little and big).

Tail Recursion is a Brain Hack Not a Compiler Hack

A few months ago this last-in-a-thread-of-posts generated a lot of buzz. In it, the creator of the Python programming language shared his views about how tail-recursion does not belong in Python. The only problem with the post(s) was that he, admittedly, did not understand tail-recursion. This course of events, the blog posts, comments, and aftermath, were interesting in what they revealed:

How one person can affect how so many think
How tail-recursion is so misunderstood within the developer community

The first, of course, is the prerogative of any BDFL. It is sort of fascinating how the edict that he set forth is enough to convince thousands and thousands of Pythonistas that tail-recursion is flawed and unnecessary (that is power!). That is sad, but, it is a privilege of the role. The interesting part is the impact of never understanding tail-recursion (#2): it removes an entire style of abstraction from the developers toolbox.
Here are 3 works that explain that style:

I haven’t found any other resources than those and Jon’s post here (see the last section) that touch upon the style. Do you know of any others?

Serious Statistics Programs Pay for the Fun Ones

Here is an article that explains how one of the four co-founders of SAS, a statistician, has an awesome job where the serious product (SAS) pays for him to develop the fun product (JMP).
Note: That is an understatement, as it probably would pay for him to stare at the ocean for the rest of his life if he wanted. It is still a good point, though: sell serious stuff to pay for the fun (for you) stuff.