One of Haskell’s features that I really liked was list comprehensions, so I was very pleased to discover how nice Julia’s comprehensions are!

I’ve been using wkhtmltopdf in Rails projects for years. After upgrading to Rails 6 and Ruby 2.6, PDF creation started failing for me. This post documents what I did to get it to work again.

Advent of Code 2020

Some Racketeers mentioned the Advent of Code 2020, and I thought it would be fun to give it a shot this year. I’ll be discussing my solution to Day 1 Part 2, so if you haven’t completed it yet, you may want to hold off on reading further.

I added a advent-of-code–2020 directory within my LearningRacket repository where I’ll be adding my solutions.

I occasionally compile some statistics on programming language popularity by running a bunch of Google searches to rank programming languages according to the number of results. I wouldn’t read too much into these stats, but they are not without value.

This time, I’ve included the code I use (written in Racket) and the raw data.

I made the following Google searches and summed the results:

"implemented in <lang>"
"written in <lang>"
"developed in <lang>"
"programmed in <lang>"

I made a number of Google searches of the forms below and summed the results:

"implemented in <lang>"
"written in <lang>"
"developed in <lang>"
"programmed in <lang>"

I made a number of Google searches of the forms below and summed the results:

"implemented in <lang>"
"written in <lang>"
"developed in <lang>"
"programmed in <lang>"

I made a number of Google searches of the forms below and summed the results:

"implemented in <lang>"
"written in <lang>"
"developed in <lang>"
"programmed in <lang>"

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:

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.