Advogato blog for welisc

5 Apr 2008

Sat, 5 Apr 2008 17:26:24 GMT

Exhibit might be exactly what I need.

5 Apr 2008

Sat, 5 Apr 2008 10:25:07 GMT

Thinking about creating a simple application for displaying my family genealogy database. Is it possible to create one that runs entirely in the browser?

Two interesting projects:

TaffyDB is a Javascript database that's designed to be run in a browser.

Mjt is an in-browser web framework.

6 Dec 2005

Tue, 6 Dec 2005 15:27:46 GMT

Why Reddit was rewritten in Python explains why the Reddit engine, originally developed in Lisp, was rewritten in Python. Basically, it comes down to a lack of libraries in Lisp that are readily available in Python.

4 Dec 2005

Sun, 4 Dec 2005 13:36:28 GMT

Why Ruby is an acceptable LISP

21 Oct 2005

Fri, 21 Oct 2005 09:57:56 GMT

Data Munging for Non-Programming Biologists describes The Scriptome.

29 Aug 2005

Mon, 29 Aug 2005 20:19:49 GMT

The horror, the horror.

Tim Bray on Ruby (via Lambda The Ultimate) contains a reference to

... COBOL's ALTER, deprecated 40 years ago and now often cited as the worst feature ever to appear in a major programming language.

How bad could this ALTER statement be?

Very bad indeed.

Style is Substance.

Ken Arnold's Style is Substance argues that programming languages should enforce programming style.

11 Apr 2003

Fri, 11 Apr 2003 15:32:51 GMT

SuMO is a new server for finding ligand-binding sites in proteins. It's the first example I've seen of a bioinformatics application written in OCaml.

Been trying out Jeff Schrager's tutorial Intelligent Computational Biology in BioLisp.

13 Feb 2002

Wed, 13 Feb 2002 19:14:04 GMT

Avoiding thesis work by writing an Eiffel version of Goldberg's Simple Genetic Algorithm. Appears to work but performance is disappointing: about half the speed of the C version. Turning off GC makes little difference.

6 Feb 2002

Wed, 6 Feb 2002 15:26:58 GMT

OCaml and scsh

chalst suggests scsh as an alternative to OCaml. My main interest in OCaml is as a language that I can write can code in as quickly as in a scripting language and compile to get high performance if necessary. (My real interest is in modelling protein structures which needs every drop of performance I can get). That said, I like the design philosophy behind scsh and the idea of embedding domain-specific little languages.

The only real reasons I prefer OCaml over Scheme is that it's statically typed and it has a reputation for being very fast. I'm not sure these are good reasons. Scheme programmers seem to manage just fine without static typing and Brad Lucier showed that, using Gambit-C, you could get performance equivalent to C from Scheme code for number-crunching PDEs.

I think I'm a Scheme programmer at heart but for mercenary reasons I've learning to live with C++ and trying to ignore my suspicion that using Scheme would help me to "beat the averages".

5 Feb 2002

Tue, 5 Feb 2002 17:21:54 GMT

Invested in a copy of The C++ Programming Language last weekend.

My other language is OCaml.