I previously wrote a post about switching from Carbon Emacs to Gnu Emacs. Upgrading is pretty simple now, so I thought I’d record the procedure for installing Emacs from source on OSX for future reference:

In September, 2008, I translated Peter Norvig’s spelling corrector into Ruby. My current favorite language is Racket, so I thought it would be a good exercise to port it to Racket. After some helpful tips by Vincent St-Amour and Sam Tobin-Hochstadt in the #racket IRC channel, I came up with the following. I’ll show it two different ways, the first minimizes the line count (without sacrificing too much stylistically) to 27 lines, and the second is closer to how I’d normally format it:

Here’s a great, two part, video by Matthew Flatt about embedding DSLs in Racket. Being able to hack the language is one of Racket’s/Lisp’s killer features:

The End of Moore’s Law

For the last few years (since 2009), I’ve been pitching the idea to my peers that language speed & concurrency/parallel capabilities will become more important as CPU clock speeds plateau and manufacturers add more CPU cores instead of advancing clock rates. My 2+ year old Macbook Pro has 4 cores and 8 hyperthreads.

I stumbled upon a programming challenge a company was using for recruitment purposes and thought I’d create a Haskell solution as a learning exercise. The first problem was to find the longest palindrome embedded in a text string.

I first wrote a program to solve the Cracker Barrel peg board puzzle (15 holes arranged in a triangle with 14 golf tees) many years ago as youth using the BASIC language. I wish I still had the source to that, because I’m pretty sure this Haskell version would kick its butt :)

As I explain in 2009 Programming Language Plan, I’ve been in the process of evaluating programming languages to determine their suitability for use in my work. I’ve been proceeding on two fronts – statically typed functional programming languages and the venerated Lisp family.

I first became interested in functional programming when I was exposed to Python, Ruby & JavaScript a number of years ago. Since then I’ve looked into Arc, Clojure, Common Lisp, Haskell, Logo, ML & Scheme. I haven’t yet determined whether I’ll be more productive in any of them than I am with Ruby for developing web applications, but I do find them quite interesting.

One of the two parallel tracks in my 2009 Programming Language Plan begins with the Standard ML programming language, so it’s time to get started.

Update 11/23/2020: The ultimate winner for my primary programming language was Racket.

Background

The 2008 Programming Language Plan didn’t go as well as I hoped, so I’m regrouping for another go at it. I did make progress learning some Logo and teaching it to my daughters, and I worked through seven chapters of “Programming in Haskell” which was very enjoyable, but I also spent way too much time trying to decide which language(s) to learn without actually learning them.