Upgrading to Emacs 24.5

:: emacs

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:

How to Write a Spelling Corrector in Racket

:: programming, racket

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:

My Top 10 Programming Languages of Interest for 2013–2014

:: programming, clojure, common lisp, go, haskell, j, javascript, prolog, r, racket, ruby, scheme

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.

Cracker Barrel Peg Board Puzzle in Haskell

:: haskell, programming

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 :)

TriFunc.org

:: functional programming, programming

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.