The Open Source Process In Action

Via Projectionist comes this impressive animation of the Python language's development over time ...

An Awesome Lecturer

Apple just expanded iTunes U to cover more universities, including at least one in Australia ... the University of NSW.

So, I popped on over to see what lectures were available and stumbled upon some introductory C programming lectures by a chap named Richard Buckland.

When I finally make it into the teaching profession, I just hope my classes can be a fraction of the fun this bloke's are.

Even if you have no interest in computing, please watch at least some of this. I think Richard has a truly amazing ability to bond with his class.

Fortunately, the lectures are also on YouTube, so you don't need to subscribe to iTunes U unless you want to. Here's the one I watched last night.

A quick warning, though ... it starts out a little slowly, because it would seem the lecture theatre was a slightly tricky to find, so he waits a few minutes to give people a chance to get there.

Regular Expression Service

Thanks to Download Squad for pointing me to RegExr, a browser-based regular expression tester.

There are dedicated applications out there for playing with regular expressions.

However, it's nice to have a web service for those times when you're not in front of your own machine.

Developer Cheat Sheets

Via Listropolis, I discovered a list of cheat sheets for developers.

There's a bit of duplication, with three CSS, two MySQL and three Unix sheets, but there should be something of value to most people in there.

I think the Google one will probably be fun to look through.

The post also alerted me to Regex Lib, a site that contains a library of regular expressions for all sorts of things.

Fun For All Ages

It's never too early to get the kiddies into programming!

C-Jump is a board game where you win by putting together instructions to get to the finish line.

It doesn't get much better than that :-) !!

Happy Birthday, PFDS!

Apparently, this year is the tenth anniversary of the publication of Chris Okasaki's book Purely Function Data Structures.

I can't say much about the content, because I've only ever skimmed through it once, a couple of years ago. What I can tell you is that it presents data structures from the perspective of purely functional languages (eg Haskell and ML), where values are immutable once they're created.

That sounds very strange to we non-FP developers, because most structures we play with are modified quite a bit. However, it leads to some interesting new forms, some with tantalising names like "bootstrapped heaps".

There's a PDF available if you don't want to spring for the dead tree version.

Pragmatic Interview

I just finished watching the video of an interview that Jim Coplien did with Dave Thomas, of the Pragmatic Programmers.

A lot of what he said I'd heard before, but there was still something in there even to interest me.

For example, how he used his Code Kata when learning Haskell and Erlang.

Definitely worth a look.

Happy Birthday Don!

Today is Donald Knuth's 70^th birthday ... and may he have many, many more of them.

Recursivity has a nice set of links to pages celebrating the event, including this one on Good Math, Bad Math, discussing T_EX and this particularly nice one.

If ever there was a reason to consider human cloning, Knuth is it!

Erlang LZW

I started looking at Erlang some time back.

It's quite an interesting language that implements a number of idioms that are foreign to my OO-based mind, which makes it a good way to give the brain some exercise.

Good Math, Bad Math has had a number of posts relating to it recently, and it was nice to see this one discussing an Erlang implementation of the Lempel-Ziv-Welch compression algorithm.

More years ago than I care to remember, I worked on a C implementation of this for the firmware of a modem that Digital were developing here in Australia.

So, I'm fairly familiar (if somewhat rusty!) on how one codes it in a procedural language. Hence, the article provides a way for me to connect my aging knowledge to this new (to me) language.

I've only partly grokked the details so far, but I'm getting there.

The Master Of Us All

During a chat with my good friend Carsten, he mentioned Project Euler, titled after the famous mathematician of the same name, Leonard Euler.

It's a site that provides a set of mathematical problems that one can attack either via pure thought or by writing some code.

For each problem, there is a forum page where people can discuss their approach and any code they wrote to solve it.

I plan to have a go at as many of them as I can handle. Even just thinking about a problem and reading other people's approaches should be a great learning exercise.