{
I was looking over Justice Gray's post on becoming a better developer in 6 months and noticed that he had listed Freidl's Mastering Regular Expressions as a one week reading project. I'll preface my comments by admitting I am not the quickest read - unless I'm reading something I don't particularly care about I tend to go it slow no matter what the subject matter.
However.
Not really thinking of connecting the dots I checked in on Jeff Freidl's blog and digging around saw it took him 2.5 years to complete the first edition of the book.
It strikes me as funny that there would be such a disparity in creation and consumption. Of course I may be slow - a big part of my wanting to learn Perl was the desire to have the capacity to "think" in regular expressions - but over the last few years as I've gotten better and better I find it hard to think I could compensate the little projects and tools I've written without the pain and grit of using what I read slowly.
But then again we can all rest assured that there's no rush.
}
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
Sunday, July 29, 2007
Remove Duplicate Lines In Python
{
I had posted about the set operator in Python with some questions. All that changed today when I wrote a little script to remove duplicate lines from a file. The set operator takes a list and automatically gets rid of duplicate items. Very useful for situations like this:
}
I had posted about the set operator in Python with some questions. All that changed today when I wrote a little script to remove duplicate lines from a file. The set operator takes a list and automatically gets rid of duplicate items. Very useful for situations like this:
#!/usr/bin/env python
f = open("c:\\temp\\Original.txt")
f2 = open("c:\\temp\\Unique.txt", "w")
uniquelines = set(f.read().split("\n"))
f2.write("".join([line + "\n" for line in uniquelines]))
f2.close()
}
Saturday, July 21, 2007
Shuffled Arrays
{
One of my weaknesses is that I love puzzles. And once I'm puzzle solving, I usually dwell on the problem beyond its worth. I recently saw a job ad - I'll leave this post disconnected - that had a quiz associated with it. The quiz amounts, basically, to shuffling items in an array (javascript).
My first stab was intuitive, but I wonder if it's the most optimal because it relies on a lot of discarded data. In my loop generating a random order, I essentially go through an undetermined amount of times discarding results that already exist in the randomized array. Additionally the array with random numbers is just for positioning and is probably unnecessary.
Here is the code:
I was thinking about this today and it may be more effecient to make a random number of passes at the array swapping pairs of items. A shuffling cards approach may be slightly more effecient although to have meaningful swaps there would need to be a minimum number of passes - and additional complexity with making sure pairs were swapped in random pattern.
Anyway, it was interesting and I'm always curious about more elegant solutions.
}
One of my weaknesses is that I love puzzles. And once I'm puzzle solving, I usually dwell on the problem beyond its worth. I recently saw a job ad - I'll leave this post disconnected - that had a quiz associated with it. The quiz amounts, basically, to shuffling items in an array (javascript).
My first stab was intuitive, but I wonder if it's the most optimal because it relies on a lot of discarded data. In my loop generating a random order, I essentially go through an undetermined amount of times discarding results that already exist in the randomized array. Additionally the array with random numbers is just for positioning and is probably unnecessary.
Here is the code:
function BuildArray(){
// just builds a random array to work with
var testArray = new Array();
testArray.push('Test 0');
testArray.push('Test 1');
testArray.push('Test 2');
testArray.push('Test 3');
return testArray;
}
function GetShiftOrder(testObject){
// this is what sorts things out
var upperBound = testObject.length;
var newOrder = new Array();
var shuffledArray = new Array();
builder:
while(newOrder.length < upperBound){
n = parseInt(Math.random() * upperBound);
for(i=0;i<newOrder.length;i++){
if(newOrder[i] == n){
continue builder;
}
}
newOrder.push(n);
shuffledArray.push(testObject[n]);
}
alert(newOrder + '\n' + shuffledArray);
}
I was thinking about this today and it may be more effecient to make a random number of passes at the array swapping pairs of items. A shuffling cards approach may be slightly more effecient although to have meaningful swaps there would need to be a minimum number of passes - and additional complexity with making sure pairs were swapped in random pattern.
Anyway, it was interesting and I'm always curious about more elegant solutions.
}
Thursday, July 19, 2007
Sunday, July 15, 2007
Sieve of Eratosthenes, Python, Set Operations
{
I pretty much broke down after TechEd. I thought I'd be patient enough to wait for Ruby but because Python is most mature I have started to learn it, whitespaces or no.
The first thing I did was check out Guido van Rossum's tutorial for programmers, which was an excellent first step. I've followed that up with some random programming - a lot of fun so far.
I was wondering about the set operations in python and how that made a difference in programming since there aren't syntactical equivalents in .NET. Incidentally at the time I was reading The Man Who Loved Only Numbers and ran across a short description of the Sieve of Eratosthenes as a way of finding primes. I thought it would be a good way to check out the set operations of Python.
I wrote the following:
Interesting, but slow. The way I may do something like that in C# (which also works just fine in Python) would be this, which I wrote later:
It's a lot faster than the previous approach which makes sense - doing set algebra on large sets should take a long time... but that begs the question: are those set operations dangerous (ie. so slow as to be costly).
I'm wondering what's "pythonic" and how a jedi would write this most effeciently.
}
I pretty much broke down after TechEd. I thought I'd be patient enough to wait for Ruby but because Python is most mature I have started to learn it, whitespaces or no.
The first thing I did was check out Guido van Rossum's tutorial for programmers, which was an excellent first step. I've followed that up with some random programming - a lot of fun so far.
I was wondering about the set operations in python and how that made a difference in programming since there aren't syntactical equivalents in .NET. Incidentally at the time I was reading The Man Who Loved Only Numbers and ran across a short description of the Sieve of Eratosthenes as a way of finding primes. I thought it would be a good way to check out the set operations of Python.
I wrote the following:
from System import *
def multiples(num, thresh):
multi = []
for i in range(2,thresh):
m = num * i
if(m < thresh):
multi.append(m)
else:
break
return multi
primeThresh = 5000
print DateTime.Now.ToString("MM/dd/yyyy hh:mm:ss")
nums = range(2,primeThresh)
for n in nums:
nums = set(nums) - set(multiples(n, primeThresh))
print nums
print DateTime.Now.ToString("MM/dd/yyyy hh:mm:ss")
Interesting, but slow. The way I may do something like that in C# (which also works just fine in Python) would be this, which I wrote later:
from System import *
primeThresh = 5000
print DateTime.Now.ToString("MM/dd/yyyy hh:mm:ss")
nums = range(2,primeThresh)
for n in nums:
for m in range(2,primeThresh):
try:
mult = n * m
if(mult > primeThresh):
break
nums.remove(mult)
except:
pass
print nums
print DateTime.Now.ToString("MM/dd/yyyy hh:mm:ss")
It's a lot faster than the previous approach which makes sense - doing set algebra on large sets should take a long time... but that begs the question: are those set operations dangerous (ie. so slow as to be costly).
I'm wondering what's "pythonic" and how a jedi would write this most effeciently.
}
Saturday, July 14, 2007
Being Better
{
I probably won't be officially "tagged" but a meme is going around about what one would do in the next 6 months to become better. Hanselman, in his podcast, spoke of a few things and the responses seem to be going up around the blogs.
How will I be better? Most of the things people mentioned are things I already try to do: reading technical books, working on my software, looking at open source, training others... but one thing I want to do is to start posting code.
I write a lot of code and much of it doesn't make it here because I'm sheepish about looking foolish. But getting better is about having courage to show my work because without that, how could it get any better?
I'm going to start with my JAPH, a program that prints "Just Another Perl Hacker." It's meant to be novel and I actually like mine since it leverages some language features that don't exist in my mainstay, C#. The map operation can visit each item on an array performing some opertion - in this case I'm using a regular expression on each item and grabbing alternating characters! I haven't been writing perl for a long time so hopefully over time I can claim a better one but at least this is my own thinking at play, destined for improvement. I did post it on usenet (a first version which had some foolish mistakes) but this is after a little bit of massage:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
# David's JAPH, volume 0.1
map(print(/(\w)\w/g," "),
qw(Jaubsctd Aenfogthhiejrk Plemrmln Hoapcqkresrt));
The original JAPHs, from Randall Schwartz, were not really about obfuscation but more about language features. The use of map, regular expressions, and $_ in the above are what make it interesting to me.
}
I probably won't be officially "tagged" but a meme is going around about what one would do in the next 6 months to become better. Hanselman, in his podcast, spoke of a few things and the responses seem to be going up around the blogs.
How will I be better? Most of the things people mentioned are things I already try to do: reading technical books, working on my software, looking at open source, training others... but one thing I want to do is to start posting code.
I write a lot of code and much of it doesn't make it here because I'm sheepish about looking foolish. But getting better is about having courage to show my work because without that, how could it get any better?
I'm going to start with my JAPH, a program that prints "Just Another Perl Hacker." It's meant to be novel and I actually like mine since it leverages some language features that don't exist in my mainstay, C#. The map operation can visit each item on an array performing some opertion - in this case I'm using a regular expression on each item and grabbing alternating characters! I haven't been writing perl for a long time so hopefully over time I can claim a better one but at least this is my own thinking at play, destined for improvement. I did post it on usenet (a first version which had some foolish mistakes) but this is after a little bit of massage:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
# David's JAPH, volume 0.1
map(print(/(\w)\w/g," "),
qw(Jaubsctd Aenfogthhiejrk Plemrmln Hoapcqkresrt));
The original JAPHs, from Randall Schwartz, were not really about obfuscation but more about language features. The use of map, regular expressions, and $_ in the above are what make it interesting to me.
}
JLam on DNR
{
I never mind a long drive with a podcast. A few days ago I listened to John Lam on Dot Net Rocks. I'll admit that sometimes the DNR people can be annoying to me (think Richard Campbell saying over and over like it's a joke "Managed JavaScript??") but it was all worth it to hear some of the internal goings on with the Iron Ruby project.
Gleaning: Iron Ruby is a ways off. I got somewhat impatient and have been using IronPython in the meantime, but more on that later. That's not a small decision for me because I am of the Norvig perspective on learning a new language - it takes the length of time needed to think in terms of the idioms of that language, as opposed to just writing your code with different syntax and keywords (ala writing C# in Ruby).
Gleaning: Ruby is a powerful language for creating domain specific languages. That meme has been floating in my head for a while - listened to a good Software Engineering Radio podcast on the topic sometime back.
Gleaning: JLam talks a bit about how the learning curve for new languages these days revolves around the frameworks for languages - I think the idea of Ruby combined with .NET is that the .NET libraries will fill a gap that Ruby has always missed in library support. Dangerous or brilliant? In other words, I'm sure the open source crowd (is/will be) up in arms because this will, in their minds, dilute the community effort behind a language. Brilliant because the Mort you know (who is probably your boss) will have a better level of confidence about using it.
Gleaning: Iron Ruby is implemented in C# but Managed Javascript for Silverlight is a VB.NET implementation!
}
I never mind a long drive with a podcast. A few days ago I listened to John Lam on Dot Net Rocks. I'll admit that sometimes the DNR people can be annoying to me (think Richard Campbell saying over and over like it's a joke "Managed JavaScript??") but it was all worth it to hear some of the internal goings on with the Iron Ruby project.
Gleaning: Iron Ruby is a ways off. I got somewhat impatient and have been using IronPython in the meantime, but more on that later. That's not a small decision for me because I am of the Norvig perspective on learning a new language - it takes the length of time needed to think in terms of the idioms of that language, as opposed to just writing your code with different syntax and keywords (ala writing C# in Ruby).
Gleaning: Ruby is a powerful language for creating domain specific languages. That meme has been floating in my head for a while - listened to a good Software Engineering Radio podcast on the topic sometime back.
Gleaning: JLam talks a bit about how the learning curve for new languages these days revolves around the frameworks for languages - I think the idea of Ruby combined with .NET is that the .NET libraries will fill a gap that Ruby has always missed in library support. Dangerous or brilliant? In other words, I'm sure the open source crowd (is/will be) up in arms because this will, in their minds, dilute the community effort behind a language. Brilliant because the Mort you know (who is probably your boss) will have a better level of confidence about using it.
Gleaning: Iron Ruby is implemented in C# but Managed Javascript for Silverlight is a VB.NET implementation!
}
Monday, July 02, 2007
True Story: The Cat Ate My Source
{
A security issue prompted my ISP to change passwords for all users. Normally, this wouldn't be a problem - I'd go to my repository of code, divided at present by year in a "Code05," "Code06," "Code07" format and update a constant in my Constants class and *presto* the connectivity would be back.
Problem is, what if I have to go back more than 3 years?
I'm usually not that irresponsible. In fact, I'm fiendish about backing things up. Yes, I use source control, even on my own little-bitty projects that matter to no one but me. But my mistake was using an external drive - a flakey one - which died after I'd had to reformat/reinstall. I'd backed everything up to it, and my data was gone.
Edge case since I'd after the reinstall I'd moved what was important back to the machine. Edge case because it was in a "code archive" that was something like 6 years old - code that was so long forgotten it was like a head bludgeon when I got a phone call from the client saying that their site was down.
After panicking and looking for some accidental backup (why do we look for things when we know they're gone for good?) I had an epiphany.
I downloaded the *.aspx pages and the site dll - I then used Reflector to disassemble and - I kid you not - 15 minutes later the client was up and running.
And yes, I kept the source...
}
A security issue prompted my ISP to change passwords for all users. Normally, this wouldn't be a problem - I'd go to my repository of code, divided at present by year in a "Code05," "Code06," "Code07" format and update a constant in my Constants class and *presto* the connectivity would be back.
Problem is, what if I have to go back more than 3 years?
I'm usually not that irresponsible. In fact, I'm fiendish about backing things up. Yes, I use source control, even on my own little-bitty projects that matter to no one but me. But my mistake was using an external drive - a flakey one - which died after I'd had to reformat/reinstall. I'd backed everything up to it, and my data was gone.
Edge case since I'd after the reinstall I'd moved what was important back to the machine. Edge case because it was in a "code archive" that was something like 6 years old - code that was so long forgotten it was like a head bludgeon when I got a phone call from the client saying that their site was down.
After panicking and looking for some accidental backup (why do we look for things when we know they're gone for good?) I had an epiphany.
I downloaded the *.aspx pages and the site dll - I then used Reflector to disassemble and - I kid you not - 15 minutes later the client was up and running.
And yes, I kept the source...
}
Monday, June 25, 2007
Mac History
{
It's strange that I've had a long relationship to Apple's products - or perhaps not if you're a believer and consider their reach unremarkable...
Growing up in Nairobi, a missionary's kid next door had an Apple IIc he'd occasion to let me use (more often I'd simply watch him using it). A few years later, I spent time in my high school computer classes using Apple IIe computers - for the most part it was typing but I had moments of the extracurricular.
My freshman year of college (1993), after many months hovering around the computer store, drooling and daydreaming, a family gifted my sister and I with a Powerbook 160. The little Powerbook that could took us through the college years although by the end it was on its last legs -
... after which I took a long departure from the Apple universe. I began working with PCs and forgot how much fun it was to pick icons, leverage a trackball, and use the Finder.
After talking my boss into it, however, a year ago I got the priviledge of using Macs again with a company owned, David leveraged iBook G4. It's still a foreign environment but it's nice to return to - especially last week after my HP laptop needed to be reinstalled after catching a virus.
All this to post that there is this interesting graphic of Macs in time, with most of my old friends along the way.
}
It's strange that I've had a long relationship to Apple's products - or perhaps not if you're a believer and consider their reach unremarkable...
Growing up in Nairobi, a missionary's kid next door had an Apple IIc he'd occasion to let me use (more often I'd simply watch him using it). A few years later, I spent time in my high school computer classes using Apple IIe computers - for the most part it was typing but I had moments of the extracurricular.
My freshman year of college (1993), after many months hovering around the computer store, drooling and daydreaming, a family gifted my sister and I with a Powerbook 160. The little Powerbook that could took us through the college years although by the end it was on its last legs -
... after which I took a long departure from the Apple universe. I began working with PCs and forgot how much fun it was to pick icons, leverage a trackball, and use the Finder.
After talking my boss into it, however, a year ago I got the priviledge of using Macs again with a company owned, David leveraged iBook G4. It's still a foreign environment but it's nice to return to - especially last week after my HP laptop needed to be reinstalled after catching a virus.
All this to post that there is this interesting graphic of Macs in time, with most of my old friends along the way.
}
Yegge, NBL
{
John Lam reports that Steve Yegge revealed a Javascript implementation of the Rails framework at this weekend's "Foocamp." Having just finished Yegge's most recent post Rich Programmer Food this weekend, and following his NBL (Next Big Language) post from a while back, the dots seem to be connected. It seems early even among technical blogs but I suspect information will start to seep out in the short future.
}
John Lam reports that Steve Yegge revealed a Javascript implementation of the Rails framework at this weekend's "Foocamp." Having just finished Yegge's most recent post Rich Programmer Food this weekend, and following his NBL (Next Big Language) post from a while back, the dots seem to be connected. It seems early even among technical blogs but I suspect information will start to seep out in the short future.
}
Thursday, June 21, 2007
NDepend vs Me
{
I didn't manage a blog post during TechEd but I'll take a stab at a few things that have swilled in my mind since then. The first thing I've been working on is understanding NDepend, the tool for static analysis. I went to a "Birds of a Feather" spearheaded by some folks from Corillian and had to keep my mouth shut tight so as not to look a fool. Luckily many of the folks there were like me: they knew about static analysis as a concept but were trying to figure out how they could make good use of it.
It will be quite some time before we have static analysis as a part of our build process but I'm most interested in using a tool like NDepend to take the emotion out of code reviews. That is to say that while I do love a vigorous discussion on style and preference, there are concrete measures one can look at objectively to evaluate the well being of software design.
While I'm shaky on the exact meaning of all the metrics (it was suggested to run repeatedly looking for trends) I ran it against a project that has pretty much taken my thirty first year on this earth. For a while that's been on my "to do" list but I think there's always a bit of hesitancy on my part when I'm about to be brutally honest with myself; I designed this software and wrote quite a bit of the code.
The results weren't great, but they weren't horrible. When I used it on the libraries by themselves, the visualizations of the dependencies seemed clean and tidy, and many of the metrics weren't too badly outside of some of the pointers in the cheat sheet we got.
However.
There are some obvious weaknesses that came to light. First and foremost, we were solidly in the zone of instability for most of our assemblies. There are two things that were suspicions now confirmed: first, we didn't have a very formal design process. I need to get better at perceiving my job at an architect level versus as a coder. The second is that we rushed. The rush was not just a schedule thing, it can also be attributed to our short release cycles. The agile folks recommend these, but it should be balanced with a period of silence at the beginning when overall design decisions are being made. The final item, which NDepend would have helped us with in a continuous integration cycle, was showing unused code. After a year's worth of work it's hard to look at so much and except oneself to clean it up, but as a weekly task it would be an easy way to keep things healthy and tight.
Final note: running NDepend is ridiculously easy. The hardest thing besides looking at metrics and trying to understand them is having the courage to look objectively at what you've done.
}
I didn't manage a blog post during TechEd but I'll take a stab at a few things that have swilled in my mind since then. The first thing I've been working on is understanding NDepend, the tool for static analysis. I went to a "Birds of a Feather" spearheaded by some folks from Corillian and had to keep my mouth shut tight so as not to look a fool. Luckily many of the folks there were like me: they knew about static analysis as a concept but were trying to figure out how they could make good use of it.
It will be quite some time before we have static analysis as a part of our build process but I'm most interested in using a tool like NDepend to take the emotion out of code reviews. That is to say that while I do love a vigorous discussion on style and preference, there are concrete measures one can look at objectively to evaluate the well being of software design.
While I'm shaky on the exact meaning of all the metrics (it was suggested to run repeatedly looking for trends) I ran it against a project that has pretty much taken my thirty first year on this earth. For a while that's been on my "to do" list but I think there's always a bit of hesitancy on my part when I'm about to be brutally honest with myself; I designed this software and wrote quite a bit of the code.
The results weren't great, but they weren't horrible. When I used it on the libraries by themselves, the visualizations of the dependencies seemed clean and tidy, and many of the metrics weren't too badly outside of some of the pointers in the cheat sheet we got.
However.
There are some obvious weaknesses that came to light. First and foremost, we were solidly in the zone of instability for most of our assemblies. There are two things that were suspicions now confirmed: first, we didn't have a very formal design process. I need to get better at perceiving my job at an architect level versus as a coder. The second is that we rushed. The rush was not just a schedule thing, it can also be attributed to our short release cycles. The agile folks recommend these, but it should be balanced with a period of silence at the beginning when overall design decisions are being made. The final item, which NDepend would have helped us with in a continuous integration cycle, was showing unused code. After a year's worth of work it's hard to look at so much and except oneself to clean it up, but as a weekly task it would be an easy way to keep things healthy and tight.
Final note: running NDepend is ridiculously easy. The hardest thing besides looking at metrics and trying to understand them is having the courage to look objectively at what you've done.
}
Slowly Back
{
After a weekend with a virus, and a horrible waste of time, I've got a clean installation of XP. The upside was that it forced me back to the iBook G4 that's been a little lonely without me.
}
After a weekend with a virus, and a horrible waste of time, I've got a clean installation of XP. The upside was that it forced me back to the iBook G4 that's been a little lonely without me.
}
Wednesday, June 06, 2007
Programming Personality
{
This programming personality test was interesting.
Your programmer personality type is: PLSC
}
This programming personality test was interesting.
Your programmer personality type is: PLSC
You're a Planner.You may be slow, but you'll usually find the best
solution. If something's worth doing, it's worth doing right.
You like coding at a Low level.You're from the old school of programming
and believe that you should have an intimate relationship with the computer.
You don't mind juggling registers around and spending hours getting a 5%
performance increase in an algorithm.
You work best in a Solo situation.The best way to program is by yourself.
There's no communication problems, you know every part of the code allowing you
to write the best programs possible.
You are a Conservative programmer.The less code you write, the less chance
there is of it containing a bug. You write short and to the point code that gets
the job done efficiently.
}
Tuesday, June 05, 2007
Free Powershell Book
{
All I can say is that I'm loving powershell right now. Hopefully some more goodies will ensue upon this blog but if you're learning like me you can get a free book by leveraging the full length help that is offered on objects. You can print in the following steps:
Get the cmdlets and send the documentation of each to its own file:
get-command % {man $_ -full >"C:/Power/$_.txt"}
Now make an index page so you can navigate to the individuals:
$cmd = get-command % {write-output "<a href='$_.txt'>$_</a><br>"}
"<html>$cmd</html>" >C:/Power/index.html
}
All I can say is that I'm loving powershell right now. Hopefully some more goodies will ensue upon this blog but if you're learning like me you can get a free book by leveraging the full length help that is offered on objects. You can print in the following steps:
Get the cmdlets and send the documentation of each to its own file:
get-command % {man $_ -full >"C:/Power/$_.txt"}
Now make an index page so you can navigate to the individuals:
$cmd = get-command % {write-output "<a href='$_.txt'>$_</a><br>"}
"<html>$cmd</html>" >C:/Power/index.html
}
Sunday, June 03, 2007
Partying with Palermo
{
Going to Party with Palermo tonight. Looking forward to meeting the jedi and getting TechEd started right!
Monday, May 28, 2007
Quality
{
Via Mads I watched Douglas Crockford present on quality in software development. I posted before on some of his excellent javascript tutorials, this is on par with them. While he's done a good job of granting some ideas in making software quality better, my train of thought goes towards my own workplace and how we can make information like that actionable.
}
Via Mads I watched Douglas Crockford present on quality in software development. I posted before on some of his excellent javascript tutorials, this is on par with them. While he's done a good job of granting some ideas in making software quality better, my train of thought goes towards my own workplace and how we can make information like that actionable.
}
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Visibility, Alpha Geeks
{
Who are the alpha geeks out there? According to many, there are none outside of Microsoft using Microsoft tools. Ergo, I must be excluded unless my night sessions with perl in Komodo somehow grant me reprieve... very doubtful... but rather than bristle and come up with examples of people who are accomplished and effective while not being on Microsoft's payroll I'm prompted on a different question: how do we define "alpha geek" especially in a world where so many of us don't know if we're good or not?
I'll answer in the negative because the blogosphere seems to taint judgement in one respect: visibility. There are quite a few people who maintain a loud profile and acquire a status as "expert" and yet when you look more closely at the body of work it doesn't reconcile itself with the status their profile seems to afford them.
I respect people like Hanselman, Haack, Moise, Atwood, JLam, and so on - they seem to have jobs I can empathize with and still find time to be the large sounding boards online. Banking software is involved, complicated stuff, and not only that, it's the type of software that I write. When I compare the design goals of something like NStatic or RubyCLR to pretty web CRUD, I find myself with more respect for the former.
But these are people we all know because they are in our aggregators. They are good but for every one there are many silently effective "alpha geeks" that don't prioritize a web presence. Think game developers here... more specifically think of someone like John Carmack - not necessarily a Microsoft developer but neither a well dressed Web 2.0 pundit. These are people living a little lower level, cranking out stuff even as the blogosphere distends itself with opinions like my own.
So I keep going back to that wariness of visibility. For all the fashion against Microsoft, what makes or breaks my impressions are the body of work that accompanies the comments.
}
Who are the alpha geeks out there? According to many, there are none outside of Microsoft using Microsoft tools. Ergo, I must be excluded unless my night sessions with perl in Komodo somehow grant me reprieve... very doubtful... but rather than bristle and come up with examples of people who are accomplished and effective while not being on Microsoft's payroll I'm prompted on a different question: how do we define "alpha geek" especially in a world where so many of us don't know if we're good or not?
I'll answer in the negative because the blogosphere seems to taint judgement in one respect: visibility. There are quite a few people who maintain a loud profile and acquire a status as "expert" and yet when you look more closely at the body of work it doesn't reconcile itself with the status their profile seems to afford them.
I respect people like Hanselman, Haack, Moise, Atwood, JLam, and so on - they seem to have jobs I can empathize with and still find time to be the large sounding boards online. Banking software is involved, complicated stuff, and not only that, it's the type of software that I write. When I compare the design goals of something like NStatic or RubyCLR to pretty web CRUD, I find myself with more respect for the former.
But these are people we all know because they are in our aggregators. They are good but for every one there are many silently effective "alpha geeks" that don't prioritize a web presence. Think game developers here... more specifically think of someone like John Carmack - not necessarily a Microsoft developer but neither a well dressed Web 2.0 pundit. These are people living a little lower level, cranking out stuff even as the blogosphere distends itself with opinions like my own.
So I keep going back to that wariness of visibility. For all the fashion against Microsoft, what makes or breaks my impressions are the body of work that accompanies the comments.
}
Sunday, May 13, 2007
RIA: Game of Thrones
{
Catching up on my aggregator yesterday I saw that Dare had posted about Sun's response to Silverlight: their own rich internet application (RIA) framework to supplant (though the politically correct answer is not that it would, it's just a "new opportunity") some of the Web 2.0/AJAXish things that have been popular of late. Mary Joe Foley presents a noncommittal analysis and Sam Ruby points to a few resources.
I went to Sun's page and although it seems like a real enough project the fact that it's applet based right now (and far slower than the Silverlight beta in installing) seems to point to it as an unfinished thought. Their demos at this point are not just slow, but rather underwhelming - compare that with the MLB demo at Silverlight and it's quite a contrast.
But I'm willing to assume that Sun is serious and that their technology has a lot of appeal, especially to many people who live on the "Not Microsoft" koolaid. If that's the case there is a three way battle going on between Adobe, Sun, and Microsoft for how RIAs will be developed.
I wonder if it's wise in a situation like this to hope for a clear winner; competition should hopefully produce the best technology out of each company. Although there will doubtless be compatibility questions that come up, but because each seems to be plugin/runtime based, it seems like developers will have an opportunity to choose a target and build with/for it rather than some of the monkeying around that needs to be done to make a web application work on multiple browsers.
}
Catching up on my aggregator yesterday I saw that Dare had posted about Sun's response to Silverlight: their own rich internet application (RIA) framework to supplant (though the politically correct answer is not that it would, it's just a "new opportunity") some of the Web 2.0/AJAXish things that have been popular of late. Mary Joe Foley presents a noncommittal analysis and Sam Ruby points to a few resources.
I went to Sun's page and although it seems like a real enough project the fact that it's applet based right now (and far slower than the Silverlight beta in installing) seems to point to it as an unfinished thought. Their demos at this point are not just slow, but rather underwhelming - compare that with the MLB demo at Silverlight and it's quite a contrast.
But I'm willing to assume that Sun is serious and that their technology has a lot of appeal, especially to many people who live on the "Not Microsoft" koolaid. If that's the case there is a three way battle going on between Adobe, Sun, and Microsoft for how RIAs will be developed.
I wonder if it's wise in a situation like this to hope for a clear winner; competition should hopefully produce the best technology out of each company. Although there will doubtless be compatibility questions that come up, but because each seems to be plugin/runtime based, it seems like developers will have an opportunity to choose a target and build with/for it rather than some of the monkeying around that needs to be done to make a web application work on multiple browsers.
}
Saturday, May 12, 2007
The Mighty DLR sans Perl
{
It wasn't until this morning that I had a chance to look at John Lam and Jim Hugunin present on the DLR at Mix. My response is a mixture of giddiness and shock - appropriate I hope for a programming language geek like me. Lam begins the presentation by writing a "simple" application with a mixture of C# (an onscreen button), with its click event handled in Ruby, obtaining parameters from Visual Basic and making a call to a Javascript function. Hugunin is not to be outdone: he follows up with an animation library he has written and his own mixture of onscreen manipulation with a mix of Python, Visual Basic, Javascript, and Ruby.
This is the part of Silverlight that I can grok as a developer of nary so flashy (pun intended) as much as practical pieces of software. The ability to put so many languages in concert, the development experience as text-based and interactive (edit text and refresh just like you do with HTML), and the cross platform support make my mind swim with potential uses. The fact that their demonstration was on a Mac was a brash in the best sense: it's a level of confidence that's not based on arrogance, but preference (Lam presented on a Macbook pro at Teched last year).
I was fortunate enough to meet John Lam at TechEd last year (I have this problem of "freezing up" when I meet people I respect as much as that - all my questions/ability to speak vanishes) and had I the foresight I'd have asked what his thoughts are on Perl. The dynamic languages Microsoft is supporting initially seem like smart choices and certain languages like Smalltalk may not be popular enough for them to justify an implementation. But Perl? I would have thought it would make the cut. I understand that it could be a syntactically difficult language but there are features in Javascript such as handling parameters on functions that seem to be on that order of magnitude in difficulty.
Although the Perl community is tremendous, it seems as fractured as 3rd century Rome. But that being said it's possible that either one of the monks or a clever company will start a project that makes it another language in the DLR family.
Or maybe I'll start a PerlCLR project and get hired by the b0rg. Not even in my dreams do I have skills like that ...
}
It wasn't until this morning that I had a chance to look at John Lam and Jim Hugunin present on the DLR at Mix. My response is a mixture of giddiness and shock - appropriate I hope for a programming language geek like me. Lam begins the presentation by writing a "simple" application with a mixture of C# (an onscreen button), with its click event handled in Ruby, obtaining parameters from Visual Basic and making a call to a Javascript function. Hugunin is not to be outdone: he follows up with an animation library he has written and his own mixture of onscreen manipulation with a mix of Python, Visual Basic, Javascript, and Ruby.
This is the part of Silverlight that I can grok as a developer of nary so flashy (pun intended) as much as practical pieces of software. The ability to put so many languages in concert, the development experience as text-based and interactive (edit text and refresh just like you do with HTML), and the cross platform support make my mind swim with potential uses. The fact that their demonstration was on a Mac was a brash in the best sense: it's a level of confidence that's not based on arrogance, but preference (Lam presented on a Macbook pro at Teched last year).
I was fortunate enough to meet John Lam at TechEd last year (I have this problem of "freezing up" when I meet people I respect as much as that - all my questions/ability to speak vanishes) and had I the foresight I'd have asked what his thoughts are on Perl. The dynamic languages Microsoft is supporting initially seem like smart choices and certain languages like Smalltalk may not be popular enough for them to justify an implementation. But Perl? I would have thought it would make the cut. I understand that it could be a syntactically difficult language but there are features in Javascript such as handling parameters on functions that seem to be on that order of magnitude in difficulty.
Although the Perl community is tremendous, it seems as fractured as 3rd century Rome. But that being said it's possible that either one of the monks or a clever company will start a project that makes it another language in the DLR family.
Or maybe I'll start a PerlCLR project and get hired by the b0rg. Not even in my dreams do I have skills like that ...
}
Sunday, May 06, 2007
What Is Silverlight - The Poster
{
Yeah, there felt like a little impedence mismatch in Scott Hanselman and the Mike Harsh describing Silverlight - ironically Scott being more excited than Mike who actually worked on the project. Let's allow for Mike just not being a visibly enthused sort of person -
Microsoft posted a graphic that is meant to be a resource on understanding what we're dealing with - sans (screen|pod|video)cast it's still not quite the nuts and bolts. Fortunately there are annotations and an entry Scott posted.
}
Yeah, there felt like a little impedence mismatch in Scott Hanselman and the Mike Harsh describing Silverlight - ironically Scott being more excited than Mike who actually worked on the project. Let's allow for Mike just not being a visibly enthused sort of person -
Microsoft posted a graphic that is meant to be a resource on understanding what we're dealing with - sans (screen|pod|video)cast it's still not quite the nuts and bolts. Fortunately there are annotations and an entry Scott posted.
}
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
