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 […]

Via the Clojure wiki I found a great page describing how you can use GNU screen and some Vim magic to let Vim play nicely with an interactive commandline program like a Common Lisp REPL, Ruby’s irb, or Python’s, well, python.
That page is a very stripped-down and simpler version of what Limp does for Vim+Lisp. […]

There are some good things about Java. The virtual machine has been refined for quite some time. The garbage collector is likely to perform well. The standard library has gone through many iterations and is very encompassing and complete and amazingly well-documented. The community is enormous. The language is as […]

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 own my own domain (or five) and one of the good things about that is having nearly infinitely many email accounts if you want them. So I tend to make up a new account for every site I register at. This leads to amusing things like getting an email from a marketing […]

The simple act of jamming lots of print statements into your code to output values to help with debugging turns out to be tedious once you do it a billion times. One problem is in Ruby code that looks like this contrived example:
arr.sort.map{|el| "’#{el}’"}.join("\n")
If you wanted to inspect your object right in the middle, […]

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 […]

I decided to try a GUI app. I decided to use QT4. I then quickly remembered why I don’t ever use C++ for anything. The amount of bullcrap you have to go through just to get a simple program going isn’t worth the bother for the kinds of programs I write. […]

My Westinghouse L2410NM LCD monitor arrived at Westinghouse’s factory, according to UPS tracking, on Thursday at 10AM. Thus the clock starts. In one week I’ll begin periodic phone calls to Westinghouse requesting updates on the status of my RMA. I know that every phone call you make to a call center costs […]

I started a new RoR project recently, and for the first time tried using migrations. They’re mildly acceptable yet I still find myself not caring much for them.
The benefits of migrations as I understand it (and why those benefits don’t matter to me) are:

You get to “version control” your database schema.
But if I want version […]