I've been looking at Haskell (again) during the last few weeks. The Haskell community is very active, and lots of new resources and libraries have sprung up during the last year. A good place to get acquainted with the Haskell world (besides the main site is The Haskell Sequence site, which hosts a lot of blogs, weekly news, reviews and so on.
As usual, the net is full of interesting papers on Haskell. If you come from the object oriented world, Oleg Kiselyov and Ralf Lammel's Haskell's overlooked object system will be a great reading. Of course, these Haskell guys are not just theoretical crackpots: often their research is accompanied by working (and quite useful) code. That's the case of hs-plugins, a library enabling users to expand the functionality of any application using Haskell, that is, to use Haskell as an extension language. Commonly these languages are dinamically typed (think of Lisp or Python), but hs-plugins show how you can use a type-safe language (with a twist) too: it's all nicely explained in this Haskell Workshop paper.
Talking about libraries, don't miss the latter developments in gtk2hs (gtk+ bindings for Haskell), specially the nice screenshots of its recent Cairo bindings.
And the list goes on and on. Maybe it's time to take a gentle introduction to Haskell and join the fun, don't you think?
F. Rideau, aka Fare, is a very original thinker, to say the least. He's probably best known as the soul of the (unfortunately vaporware) Tunes project, but he's also a very active libertarian. Just read his Citizen's Creed, or, if you're more on the technical camp, his SEX Embedding for XML, and you'll see what i mean.
I just discovered that yours truly's journal is listed in Adulau's messy desk or blog as "other blog/diary to look at", which is very nice by itself, but becomes really flattering when you look at the other entries in his list. Thank you, Alexandre.
If you're new to Emacs Wonderland and find the Emacs Manual a little bit had to digest, Learning GNU Emacs (3rd edition) may be the book you're looking for. I haven't got it, but Bytemason has a well-written review that can help making your mind up.
Autrijus Tang is well-known for developing the first working Perl 6 interpreter, Pugs (which, by the way, entered Debian Sid a couple of days ago). Pugs is written in Haskell. Perl.com has a very interesting interview with Autrijus, where, among other things, bold opinions on programming languages and Haskell appear. For instance:
Haskell . . . is faster than C++, more concise than Perl, more regular than Python, more flexible than Ruby, more typeful than C#, more robust than Java, and has absolutely nothing in common with PHP.
Undoubtedly, a programming language powerful enough to write a Perl parser is worth a look!.
This month's number of the DDJ AI Newsletter includes a fun section on AI quotes, and, of course, many of them are about Lisp. My favourite one is by Edberg Dijkstra:
"Lisp has jokingly been called 'the most intelligent way to misuse a computer'. I think that description is a great compliment because it transmits the full flavor of liberation: it has assisted a number of our most gifted fellow humans in thinking previously impossible thoughts."
Edsger Dijkstra in his Humble Programmer essay for CACM, 1972. Quoted in Paul Graham's Lisp Quotes.
The brilliant cosmologist and mathematician Sir Hermann Bondi has died at the age of 85. He was best known for developing the "steady-state" theory of the universe together with Thomas Gold and Fred Hoyle. Bondi also led a successful career as a science administrator, running the European Space Research Organisation for four years and spending six years as chief scientist to the UK Ministry of Defence. Bondi died on 10 September.
Read more in this PhysicsWeb article.
This is a funny one: a text adventure, playable in your browser, where you're Hamlet, prince of Denkmark
I am changing domain. Since today, i'm sharing a new hosting with Aleix (special kudos go to JAD), and you will find these pages at the new address:
My web lair is, unsurprisingly, at
If you happen to have registered any of my Arch archives (browsable online here), these are the new locations:
http://arch.hacks-galore.org/jao@gnu.org--2004 http://arch.hacks-galore.org/jao@gnu.org--2005 http://arch.hacks-galore.org/jao@gnu.org--conjure http://arch.hacks-galore.org/jao@gnu.org--spells
Thanks for reading!
Lisp Machines are mythical among Lisp hackers. And for a good reason. It's hard to believe it, but the programming platform they provided in the 1980's has yet to be attained by any IDE for any language. Unfortunately, the AI winter made these magic machines one of its first casualties, and nowadays we have to content ourselves with a handful of videos and nostalgic reminiscences.
But maybe the tide is turning. Rumors about Symbolics porting its Genera Environment to Macs are spreading. Are the olde good times coming back? Learn more about the upcoming re-revolution in this excellent review by Bill Clementson.