I've finally decided whether I want to keep using Haskell. I've updated the small program I wrote in the language and included my updated thoughts in the comments. You can read them in HTML or PDF.

You can also, of course, download the source code.

Every now and then I do something just to try it out. I wrote a little program in Haskell and turned into a mini-essay using Haskell's literate programming support.

• The PDF
• The source code
• The license

Sudden changes of opinion are funny.

Everyone knows that more information can change your mind, but when it happens all at once it's like opening a door that doesn't lead where you expected.
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Current Mood: amused

You could say I'm a casual user of Scheme. At least, I've mostly used it for prototyping and system scripts. But I decided, to use it and to learn from it, that I'd make something a little different: an un-object system.
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Current Mood: mellow

There was, by my modest standards, a huge response to my last post. I noticed two things about the comments here and on reddit:

1. My guess about what gcc does when you declare a return type but don't return anything was wrong.
2. Some readers thought I was saying that UH doesn't teach undergraduates anything about C or pointers or assembly.

Number one wasn't much of a surprise, but number two had me scratching my head. I decided to do another post explaining the difference between what I meant and what came across to some readers.

The short version is in the title: There's a difference between knowing how something works and knowing how you should work with it.
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Current Mood: restless

When I was an undergraduate at UH, they made a big deal about Java being the default language of the department. Unless the class had to have some other language, we used Java.

But so far I've only had one graduate class with Java. The rest have let me use whatever I want¹, or told me to use C.
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Current Mood: thankful

When a nontechnical friend asks for technical advice because they have a concept for a website, should I warn them about nontechnical difficulties?

By "concept," I mean a very short description of what they want to create. "YouTube for orthodontists" is a concept. "Like Google, but you can vote on the links" is a concept.¹
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Current Mood: discontent

I went to the Democratic caucus tonight.

I'm glad I went. It was a lot of fun, and it's probably the only time a national race will be close enough for long enough that Hawaii matters.
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Current Mood: tired

I saw the Zendo board game on reddit, as well as a link in the comments to a list of variants, and it gave me an idea.

The basic idea behind Zendo is:

1. One person is the "master" who makes up a secret rule.

2. The master starts by showing the players one example that follows the rule and one that doesn't (telling them which is which).

3. Players try to figure out the rule by

   1. Giving examples to the master who tells them whether or not the example follows the rule

   2. Guessing the rule. If the guess is wrong, the master either gives an example that follows the guessed rule but not the actual rule or gives an example that follows the actual rule but not the guessed rule.

   Exchanges between the master and a player are seen by all players.

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Current Mood: hungry

I recently came across a very odd attempt to justify torture:

I asked what was the least bad, bad thing that could happen, and suggested that it was getting a dust speck in your eye that irritated you for a fraction of a second, barely long enough to notice, before it got blinked away. And conversely, a very bad thing to happen, if not the worst thing, would be getting tortured for 50 years.

Now, would you rather that a googolplex people got dust specks in their eyes, or that one person was tortured for 50 years? . . .

Most people chose the dust specks over the torture. Many were proud of this choice, and indignant that anyone should choose otherwise: "How dare you condone torture!"

-- Eliezer Yudkowsky, "Circular Altruism" (links added)

Yudkowsky is an artificial intelligence researcher for the Singularity Institute writing on a blog run by Oxford. He's not just advocating torture on the Internet -- he's trying to help create a "superintelligence" that will, if it works the way he hopes, choose the torture over the dust.
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Current Mood: surprised

The version 1.0 release of jest (my software estimator) is available for download. The biggest difference from the beta versions is that the license has changed to GPLv3.
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Current Mood: pleased

I've been using markdown syntax for a while, and I (very) recently switched from the reference interpreter to markdown-python which has some nice extensions¹.

One extension I wanted to use was for tables, but when I tried it I found out that it won't let you put multiple lines in a table cell. (I mean multiple lines in the markdown. I assume you can force multiple lines in the HTML by using <br/>.)

So, I wrote my own extension called "wtables."²
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Current Mood: satisfied

The other day I posted a quick nitpick of Joel Spolsky's Strategy Letter VI. The response was overwhelming (one person) and negative.

Now, I reserve my right to complain about bad analogies -- even when they appear in grand, sweeping theories about something else. But my anonymous visitor has a point. I really should address Joel's main idea:
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Current Mood: indifferent

I just saw Strategy Letter VI from Joel Spolsky, and I have one minor nitpick that I feel compelled to post:
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Current Mood: amused

The nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from.

-- Andrew S. Tanenbaum

They were a little late announcing it, and I'm a little late saying anything about it, but r6rs has been ratified.
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Current Mood: gloomy

I've gone back to UHM, and last week was my very first as a graduate student.

One class, ICS 613 Software Engineering, required us to create an engineering log on Blogger. In general, I'll be putting things related to that class on Blogger and everything else here.
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Current Mood: busy

Today I sent in my ballot on r6rs ratification. I voted no, and decided to also post the explanation required on the ballot here. Rather than simply copy and paste in the S-expression ballot, I edited this into a format better suited to a website. I also changed the mailing list links to point to the specific message rather than the whole thread. The words are the same:
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Current Mood: numb

I've been knocked out by a flu the past few days, and one of the emails that piled up was a notice that I'm a member of the R6RS electorate, voting on whether to ratify the current draft of a new Scheme standard.
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Current Mood: surprised

The Hawaii Open Source Education Foundation is looking for a new workshop and class partner. I don't know all the details, but basically the partner provides space and gets a shared computer lab.

Contact HOSEF if that sounds interesting.

There are some impressive things in GNU cat. I'm not geeky enough to read the source code of all, or even most, of the programs I use, but one day I took a quick look at the source of cat. I was reminded of it the other day, when I saw yet another antiblub article on reddit.
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Current Mood: thoughtful