Coderspiel

"The idea of ‘intellectual property’ is intellectually bankrupt."

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 15:42:00 -0500

“The idea of ‘intellectual property’ is intellectually bankrupt.”

- Waffle, The Free Exchange of Ideas

"If we had to pay regular fees to become a developer, use only Apple-provided tools, and could..."

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 10:42:00 -0500

“If we had to pay regular fees to become a developer, use only Apple-provided tools, and could release only approved software through an Apple store, things like the Processing project would not have happened. I can definitively say that any success that I’ve had has come from the ability to create what I want, the way that I want, and to be able to distribute it as I see fit, usually over the internet.”

- Ben Fry, On needing approval for what we create

Scala Pages

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 10:14:13 -0500

Scala Pages:

A new web framework with an object-oriented design for “programmers who come from a Java background”.

"But, if you don’t like my definition, if you’d like to claim that an ‘actor’..."

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 10:08:35 -0500

“But, if you don’t like my definition, if you’d like to claim that an ‘actor’ is actually just a function A => Future[B] and that therefore ‘actors’ are composable, then I don’t really have a problem with that (although, why call this model ‘actors’?”

- Follow up to ‘Actors are not a good concurrency model’

Labnotes » Yaketee: new way to yak

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 18:01:56 -0500

Labnotes » Yaketee: new way to yak:

“Yaketee is a message board with a twist. To post and read messages, you have to be on the same network as the people you’re exchanging messages with.”

Scala and Lift: Quite a Pair (video)

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 13:46:12 -0500

Scala and Lift: Quite a Pair (video):

“David Pollak maintains Lift, a Rails-like app framework for Scala. In this talk, he and Martin Odersky, author of Scala, live-code a 30-line, real-time, web-based chat application and discuss the Scala constructs that allow for such concise apps.”

How to reverse a map in Scala

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 12:12:00 -0500

How to reverse a map in Scala:

Also a nice illustration of 2.8 collection improvements.

"But when we saw the NASA App for iPhone, we used the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to ask NASA..."

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 12:32:17 -0500

“But when we saw the NASA App for iPhone, we used the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to ask NASA for a copy, so that the general public could see what rules conrolled the technology they could use with their phones.”

- EFF hacks US law to reveal Cocoa Touch’s puppet strings

Curried and Confused

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:01:00 -0500

The best post on the internet got some sweet linkage again this week. You know, the one where Scala is too complex because you can express the sum of a list of numbers like so:

def sum(nums: List[Int]) = (0 /: nums) { _ + _ }

In the intervening years since that expression prompted a ‘verdict’ that Scala was too difficult for us regular folks, a lot of us have written a heck of a lot of Scala. We had to make implicit.ly just to keep up with the flow of Scala software that people are publishing these days. The pump is primed and the machinery has finally come to life. It’s an exciting time! For some.

But since it’s come up, let’s review that old /: scarecrow. What makes him so perplexing to newcomers? Some have blamed the use of non-letters in the name. Okay then, how much clearer would Joe BeanFactory find this definition?

def sum(nums: List[Int]) = (nums foldLeft 0) { _ + _ }

Not much really! Well, maybe the problem is the infix notation?

def sum(nums: List[Int]) = nums.foldLeft(0) { _ + _ }

Yeah, I don’t know. By this point our rhetorical corporate programmer has gone out for coffee. Perhaps he will be back later to decide which programming languages we’re all supposed to use for his convenience. Maybe he would rather express things like 1 + 1 as 1.plus(1) —or, maybe he just doesn’t give a Dilbert about orthogonality.

But seriously guys, I don’t think it’s the infix notation or the permitting of symbolic characters in syntactic symbols that make applications of /: difficult to grok at first. It’s the blessed currying. Setting off the first function application with parentheses prevents one’s uninitiated mind from cheaply translating it to a familiar series of parameters. Instead you have to recognize that the first function application returns a second function, which is applied to another set of parameters. It’s trippy.

Truth be told, this perplexed me at the time. But instead of rejecting the language for supporting functional constructs beyond my experience, I decided to keep learning—and I’m happy with how that has worked out. So it’s interesting that two years later, this particular functional freak-out has been ‘cited’ to brand Scala as overly complex (Perl-y) while a second thread of spite bemoans Scala’s insufficient promotion of currying.

It’s simple, you see. The currying in Scala makes innocent enterprise developers cry in their frappuccinos, while similar encounters in OCaml inspire a rapturous session of functional mind-blowing.

Well. At least you can learn Scala at your desk.

"Crap, there’s an underscore. Is it a ‘point’? Good question. And the answer is no."

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 12:50:51 -0500

“Crap, there’s an underscore. Is it a ‘point’? Good question. And the answer is no.”

- Robert Fischer Finally Admits that Scala is Functional

"The problem with modern software development is that it’s all Phase 2. The ubiquitious availability..."

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 12:03:51 -0500

“The problem with modern software development is that it’s all Phase 2. The ubiquitious availability of nearly-right-but-not-quite libraries and frameworks-that-do-it-all-for-you-except-that-actually-they-don’t wipes out the exhilaration of Phase 1, but leaves us with even more of the drudgery of Phase 2.”

- Whatever happened to programming? (Would replace ‘modern’ with ‘mainstream,’ but otherwise YES.)

Where people are staying for Scala Days

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 01:03:32 -0500

Where people are staying for Scala Days

"Because aside from the static typing, all the language features that Odersky trots out already exist..."

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 20:01:00 -0500

“Because aside from the static typing, all the language features that Odersky trots out already exist in Perl.”

- Scala: Only Different from Perl in Fundamental Ways

Dispatch 0.7.2 - implicit.ly

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 10:37:00 -0500

Dispatch 0.7.2 - implicit.ly:

Use defaultCharset charset established by >\ for post and put
Handler chaining with the >+> operator, to use more than one handler against the same request with overlapping scopes
Multipart response handling with the >--> operator in dispatch-mime, to support Riak link-walking and map-reduce

"In Scala 2.8, using the builder pattern is no longer necessary (or the most optimal solution) in..."

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 16:49:00 -0500

“In Scala 2.8, using the builder pattern is no longer necessary (or the most optimal solution) in many cases, as Scala 2.8 adds support for named and default parameters.”

- Taking Advantage of Scala 2.8: Replacing the Builder

"At this stage, the Skinput armband contains a pico projector that displays the..."

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 11:52:18 -0500

“At this stage, the Skinput armband contains a pico projector that displays the ‘touchpad’ on the user’s hand or forearm, along with biosensors that recognize skin taps on corresponding locations of the body, based on bone and soft tissue variations.”

- Your body is just a big iPod touch

Introduction to Scala slides by Peter Maas at eBay/marktplaats

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 18:43:01 -0500

Introduction to Scala slides by Peter Maas at eBay/marktplaats

Lift Web Framework 2.0 Milestone 3

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 08:16:08 -0500

Lift Web Framework 2.0 Milestone 3:

Enhancements to LiftActors and LRU to support Goat Rodeo
Add CouchDB support (lift-couchdb)
… !

"I am not particularly proud of Apple right now."

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 17:39:56 -0500

“I am not particularly proud of Apple right now.”

- waffle → For Shame

Bevy of sbt plugins

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 15:36:56 -0500

Bevy of sbt plugins:

This repository contains various plugins for the SBT build tool:

The EditSource plugin provides methods that offer a similar substitution facility to the one available with an Ant’s filterset.
The IzPack plugin provides a method that will run the IzPack compiler, generating an installer jar for your application.
The Markdown plugin supplies methods to translate Markdown documents into HTML.