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I just finished reading one of the most unusual programming books I've ever read. It's an introduction to seven languages in about 300 pages.

A couple warnings from the author, and a convinced reader: this is a book for self-starters who are willing to do some leg-work on their own. If you just read the book cover-to-cover (like I did), you will not learn any of the languages, just get a vague sense of what they can do.

The motivation to read this book is simple. If ...

Updated 01-24-2011 at 02:48 PM by WingedPanther

Tags: book review, clojure, erlang, haskell, io language, prolog, ruby, scala

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I've been running Ubuntu 9.04 for about a year, and it recently notified me that there will be no more updates for packages. With it being between semesters where I teach, I figured this would be a good time to update. About a year ago I tried this, and had issues with losing sound drivers, so I backed up my home folder and started the process.

9.10: no sound or video hardware accelleration. Again. There were also a couple of odd errors.

10.04: Again, a couple of odd ...

My adorable wife has been writing fan fiction for decades, and introduced me to the art fairly recently. In the world of fan fiction, there are not a lot of quality sites for sharing your stories. You can post them on a blog, but that's a good way to never get them read. For a long time, we've used fanfiction.net, since it's the largest repository, and much easier to work with than the second best site, mediaminer. Recently, she found a new site, ficwad, that seems to be the real answer to what ...

Tags: software design

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One of the things I'm always looking to do is increase my programming skills. What I find interesting is how the focus of that improvement has changed over the years. I'll try to trace through the areas of focus, and why I believe they require a change in perspective for each one.

The most basic level is to learn procedural programming. It doesn't really matter whether it's Java, C, C++, Pascal, or something else, almost everyone is first a procedural programmer. Every method in ...

Recently, in the course of doing some Beta-reading with my wife of some fanfiction stories, it became apparent that it would be really helpful if we could each add our comments at the same time, and independently.

Google Wave was the obvious tool for this. Unfortunately, loading it on dialup is a bit ridiculous. OK, it's a LOT ridiculous. Nice software, but the bloat is almost impossible to deal with.

After a little bit of research, I next tried AbiWord. It's a ...

I decided a few days ago to take a serious look at Haskell, and started yesterday. I cracked open a tutorial at http://learnyouahaskell.com/ and started playing with GHCi.

Haskell can bend your mind. It appears to be based on the model of Turing Machines called Recursive Functions. There are no variables, only n-ary functions. A nullary function is a constant. Other functions produce output in a deterministic manner.

The only non-deterministic functions are the ...

As many of you know, I use Delphi quite a bit at work, and also like using jEdit for my code editor. Yesterday, I started looking at what it would take to build projects from command-line so I could just work in jEdit for everything except form layout.

This is where things got ugly. It turns out that Delphi provides two incompatible methods for compiling a project. The first method is to build your project from within the IDE. This will use all of your settings for third party ...