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

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

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

The beta-3 release of jest, my command-line software estimator, is out. It adds new language factors and adjusts the default factor. To celebrate, we'll take a little project I'm doing and run some estimates on it using jest. Near the end, we'll see some of jest's advanced features.
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Current Mood: satisfied

I just sent in a registration form for voting on R6RS ratification, which is somewhat controversial. The form itself is in R5RS Scheme, which is kind of neat: ( read more . . .  )
Current Mood: hopeful

As part of learning the language, I was looking for a way to implement sorting in Scheme. I wanted something:

• Easy to implement in Scheme, preferably in a functional style
• Somewhat lazy, so I could skip a lot of the processing if I only wanted the first few items
• Reasonably fast

I found pairing heaps. ( more . . .  )
Current Mood: pleased

I heard about code katas and thought, "Hey, that sounds kind of fun." I also thought it might be a good way to learn a new language: do a kata in a language you're familiar with, then do it again in one you're learning. Then I hit a snag: the kata I started with comes with a correct result that no one except the creator reports getting. Phooey.

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Current Mood: frustrated

Factorial macro in dc:

[
d1-
d_1<f
[+d-1+ 1]Sf
d_1!<f
LfLfrsfsf
*
]sf

I tried to post this as a reply to a discussion on Good Math, Bad Math, but that's apparenlty my new place to make a fool of myself. I couldn't get it past whatever comment mangler they have installed. (It looked fine in the preview.)

You should be able to paste it into dc (which comes with pretty much every Linux distribution and Unix brand) and then invoke it with 3 lfxn to print the factorial of three.

Lisp comes with a standard indentation style. There are minor differences between the different dialects, but there's a basic "Lisp style" that's the same. Using something else is considered anathema, silly, or ignorant.

Well, get ready for some heresy in Scheme: ( Read more )
Current Mood: mischievous