Via PerlMonks I found a couple of articles discussing in good detail some of the new features of Perl6.
Perl6 steals even more things from Common Lisp than Perl5 did: it has multimethods / multiple dispatch for example, which is a huge plus. Via this interview with Damian Conway we learn that Perl6 […]

What’s the Common Lisp version of Perlmonks or Ruby-forum? I have yet to find it.
comp.lang.lisp is largely crap. 50% of the traffic on that list is spam about shoes and fake watches. The other half is equally split between:

People debating tiny, silly semantic points of the Common Lisp Hyperspec.
People stuck in the […]

I found this Perl6 imaginary timeline hilarious. Sadly we’re in 2008 and I don’t think that blue line is quite as high as it was projected to be. Though it appears that development is still slowly chugging along. I still check up on Perl 6 once every six months or so. You […]

Two posts in one, just because I can.
Rambling #1: One thing that makes a language like Ruby easy to read is that foo.bar always has the same meaning: object.method.
In Common Lisp you don’t have that. One of CL’s strengths is that everything looks the same, it’s all s-expressions. However a cost of this […]

I got through the first four chapters of PAIP yesterday and today. It’s good so far. I had reservations about spending $80 on a book, but it’s 950 pages and almost all of it is good stuff, from what I can see at a glance. Little space is wasted on introduction material […]

In Ruby, the only things that are false are nil and false. This is a nice change over other languages where other things evaluate to false in boolean tests. Like C and many others, which considers the integer 0 to be false. So is 0.0 false? How about 1e-999999? Or […]

To add yet another language to the ever-expanding list of languages I know well enough to get by but have far from mastered, in the past week or two at work I’ve needed to play with Javascript a lot. I’ve long thought of Javascript as the bane of my existence, if only for the […]

Today I rammed smack up against a brick wall in my C# endeavors. The problem at hand was something that seems pretty simple: Randomly shuffle an array. Anyone who knows Ruby knows that this is super easy. Here’s one way:
arr.sort_by { rand }
How do you do this in C#? Search google for […]

I’ve been out of college almost exactly four years. Looking back at my Computer Science classes, I think I can see some ways that my education was woefully inadequate. Or at least not what I wish it would have been, knowing what I (hope I) know now.

One thing I very much miss in Gentoo is controlling what is compiled into my Vim. You need to enable perldo and rubydo support at compiletime. Gentoo had USE flags to do it. In Ubuntu I get perldo but no rubydo by default, which is annoying.
The reason I need perldo/rubydo is because […]