[ Home | Articles | Account | People | Projects | FAQ ] Name: Jose A Ortega
Member since: 2000-12-11 21:52:30
Last Login: 2006-10-10 21:59:15
Homepage: http://hacks-galore.org/jao/
Notes: Please, see my programming weblog at
After using FreeBSD for a few months, and having to recompile all my installed ports due to an upgrade to version 5.0, i have returned to Debian: it took just two hours to update the old installed system to a spiffy Sarge distribution, without a quirk. FreeBSD ports are a far call from apt and friends.
12 Jun 2002 (updated 12 Jun 2002 at 22:07 UTC) »
<heartbeat>sites worth visiting (or, at least, sites i keep on visiting lately):
</heartbeat>
7 Mar 2002 (updated 7 Mar 2002 at 00:32 UTC) »
i also got tired of waiting for the update of the OCaml port to 3.04, once i decided that OCaml was the right choice for my next projects. i finished a fp-and-co-languages review, incluing OCaml, Haskell (very nice), Scheme (extremely elegant), ML (well, you've got OCaml) and, last and very least, Python (please, use Perl instead). At first, it was hard to get used to OCaml's syntax, but i learnt step by step to love it... and, oh well, it's just syntax. What really matters is the new semantic world that functional programming opens up; each functional language i've tried came loaded with a handful of little conceptual treasures: type inference, first-class currying and functors in ocaml; lazy evaluation and monads in haskell (with the nicest quicksort evaluation i've ever seen); continuations and macros in scheme... no wonder that reading the python tutorial was so disappointing! It is also a pleasure to find , when using and reading books about, say, ocaml, a direct map between advanced computer science issues and the language you're using; you feel like using a tool from the ground up... imperative languages like C++, Perl or Java are like folk, pop or rock music: funny and light, with some harmonic surprises now and then; funcional languages are the classical music of programming, harmony itself.
As a result of these musings, i don't feel so partial to C++ against Java: they're more or less on the same league. So, it's been not that traumatic to use java at work, a decision we took due to schedule and stuff constraints. Reading Meyer's Object Oriented Software Construction (almost finished) has also made me reconsider some of the relative virtues of both languages, and i'm beginning to appreciate some java features such as garbage collection and reflection (i still terribly miss templates and generic programming features, though). Meyer's book is, by the way, worth reading. It's very well written and insightful, once you factor out his dogmatic defense of Eiffel as the only true solution to virtually all your problems.
15 Jan 2002 (updated 15 Jan 2002 at 02:22 UTC) »
WindowMaker. Back again to wmaker, because of some annoying bugs in blackbox when resizing emacs frames. In addition, the new wmaker version 0.8 let's you launch already docked apps from the command line (or a script, for that matter), a functionality i really missed. And, finally, i took a look at the bb sourcecode, and found it very low quality C++, so... let's see how long i stick to wmaker this time!
MMDK. Must have a look at Knuth's implementation of MMIX before starting my own: it seems quite powerful, and maybe it's no use reinventing the wheel; there is even a gcc port cross-compiling C/C++ to the MMIX emulator!
8 Dec 2001 (updated 8 Dec 2001 at 22:45 UTC) »
Procmail. I've learnt to use procmail to filter my mail, and use it in conjunction with wmbiff. I've tried also mutt again, but will stick to gnus for reading mail: i'm too used to its philosophy (mail == news), and it offers better integration with emacs.
Vim and Emacs. I've played a little with vim. It's ok, but i find it far inferior to the almighty emacs. These days i've written some emacs skeletons, with a little bit of elisp (dusting my GNU Emacs Lisp Reference Manual copy) and, boy, emacs rocks!.
New journey. Definitely, i'm going to learn Ocaml, and probably mmdk (the MMIX development kit) will be written using this nifty functional, object-oriented language. I already own Cousineau and Mauny's book, and have ordered Objective Caml (in French, i'll have to learn two languages at a time!).
FreeBSD. Still happily working with it at home. The portupgrade utilities are almost making me forget apt-get :-). I'm also using blackbox again (instead of windowmaker): after trying it again, i've found it noticeably faster (and the window decorations are nicer, i think... i always get tired of the windowmaker title bars: they are too big for my taste!).
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If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!
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