devgrind

What a beautiful blog I have found: Data structures and algorithms, with nice explanations and visualizations for the complete programmer newbie.

Filed by Magnus at 12:02 pm under algorithm, data, programming
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This will not be another programming language comparison frenzy. I had just some semi-serious thoughts about something I would call “language marketing”:

If you are starting to design a new programming language, start thinking of language identity. I do not know whether this term existed prior to this posting, but language identity is for programming languages what corporate identity is for enterprises. Of course, the scope of the language and all the nifty little features and whether it is compiled or interpreted and for which platforms the language is available is of some importance - but to make your language known, you need a lot more sexiness. This language sexiness is made by (but necessarily limited to):

• A logo. Or better, an allegory. As we see in successful languages, this does not have to be an animal (although this helps a lot with O’Reilly). Java has the coffee, Python has the snake (although the name comes from the British comedy group), Ruby has the gem.
• The name. C++ is a notable exception, taking its fame mostly from its predecessor C, which did not need a fancy name because it was the programming language sent to us from above in the Old and the New Testament. But most popular languages have names which are good to remember. Ask five developers how they are pronouncing “C#” and you will get six different answers.
• A web site. This serves as a hub for everything about your language. The Python page, for example, is so resourceful that keeping a local documentation for the language should never be necessary. There is even a Firefox sidebar for easy access to all the information on the pages.
• A figure head. At best, someone as strange and bearded as Larry Wall (PERL), at least some guru whose name is not even mentioned in full (like DHH instead of David Heinemeier Hansson, Rails/Ruby), or only by first name (”Bjarne said …”).

Filed by Magnus at 11:19 am under design, humor, languages, programming
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Martin Fowler writes on his view on humane interface design, i.e. APIs that are designed for convenient use, in contrast to minimalist APIs. He states that

The essence of the humane interface is to find out what people want to do and design the interface so that it’s really easy to do the common case.

For example, Ruby’s arrays have convenience methods such as first, last, flatten, etc. which tend to be omitted in minimalist interfaces, because they can easily be implemented by clients. And Ruby also aliases method names, i.e. using multiple names for the same functionality, such as length and size of arrays. As an example for a minimalist interface, Fowler mentions the Java API for collections.

I wonder where Python falls in this spectrum. The Python folks state explicitly that

There should be one — and preferably only one — obvious way to do it.

Which sounds like a minimalist approach to me, in the meaning of “reduce stuff to the things that are canonically necessary”. But if you look at the APIs, you’ll find aliases there as well. I don’t know Python terribly well, so perhaps some Python guru can enlighten me on this?

Wrapping things up I don’t think that one approach – humane or minimalist – is necessarily better than the other. Both have their benefits and drawbacks, but like Martin Fowler I prefer humane interfaces.

Via One Man Hacking

Filed by Arne at 12:46 pm under design, java, languages, programming, python, ruby
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I found this beaut in a Delphi system I co-wrote while studying:

const
  UNENDLICH = 99999999;

Please note that (in this case) unendlich is the german counterpart for infinity.

This looks worse than it actually was. The system was an LL(1) parser generator and in order to increase performance we used fixed-length arrays for all kinds of collections, and we had to set a maximum upper bound for array indices. Maybe we shouldn’t have called it infinity, though.

Filed by Arne at 8:29 am under delphi, humor, programming, sneakysnippet
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One of my favorites from XKCD:

Filed by Magnus at 1:50 pm under humor, programming, regex
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