One of the more famous RMS deeds was his fighting along against a bunch of Symbolics hackers, reproducing their efforts during a couple of years. In the end, neither Symbolics nor LMI have survived, but RMS's next project, GNU, is still here. I've just found the story told by RMS himself, circa 1986. He was really the last true hacker.
So, do you think that functional programming languages like Haskell are just toys for scholars? Well, you'd better think again... Haskell can be used, for instance, to program Frag, a first person shooter game. I haven't played with it, but the screenshots look pretty nice. And I'm sure the code is even nicer.
If you happen to have copious amounts of free time, you may consider becoming a Linux hacker. But, where to start? Greg Kroah-Hartman has written an excellent howto. He started it as a result of this mail exchange on the linux kernel list, and the outcome is excellent.
I am an...
Entish
To which race of Middle Earth do you belong?
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Modern Memory Management by Howard Feldman -- Modern memory management isn't as simple as knowing that you have 150MB of programs to run and 256MB of memory to do it in. Modern Unix-like operating systems have their own characteristics for allocating and using memory. Howard Feldman explains how this works and shows how to analyze and reduce the memory consumption of your programs, no matter what language you use.
I'm using darcs for personal projects which don't need arch's sophistication, and i'm enjoying the experience so far. Granted, darcs is not nearly as powerful, but its simplicity feels like the Right Thing (TM). In addition, darcsweb is an excellent repository browser that plays nice with w3m. If you're curious, see my emacs skels repository on-line.
Richard M. Stallman, Linus Torvalds, and Donald E. Knuth engage in a discussion on whose impact on the computerized world was the greatest.
Stallman: "God told me I have programmed the best editor in the world!"
Torvalds: "Well, God told me that I have programmed the best operating system in the world!"
Knuth: "Wait, wait - I never said that."
(from John Goerzen's blog)
Lately, i've become more interested than ever in Common Lisp. There are two reasons: slime and Maxima.
I've mentioned slime before. Using it is a real pleasure. The combination of emacs, slime and CL is by far the best development environment i've ever used.
Maxima is a computer algebra system developed in Lisp and based on Macsyma. Macsyma was developed from 1968 to 1982 at the MIT AI Lab as part of Project MAC. It was the first comprehensive symbolic mathematics system. Today, Maxima is simply awesome, and i was thinking of writing a detailed entry about it. Fortunately, i don't need to do it myself: Bill Clementson has posted a nice overview on Maxima, just in time.
