This Statement Is False

When I saw Dude Where's My Car?, several years ago with my wife (who is Chinese), she started laughing right as they pulled into the parking lot of a Chinese restaurant . I had no idea why, but she said to wait until the end of the scene. In the scene, after they order each item, a voice from the speaker says, "and then?" and continues after they run out of things to order until Ashton Kutcher eventually destroys the speaker in frustration. When the scene was over, I asked her why she started to laugh at the beginning of the scene. She said she had heard people quoting that at work, but she never realized that the Chinese name of the restaurant, which she saw at the beginning of the scene, was "And Then." Appropriately, Scala defines infinite loops in actors using andThen. Here's how... In Scala, one way to compose functions is "f andThen g", which is the same as def newFunc[T](x: T) = g(f(x)) You can think of it as "evaluate f(x) and the...

A friend of mine wanted to implement peer-to-peer source code repositories with social networking features, like popularity ratings and such and Plexus was already on the way to being able to support something like that, so I decided to break out the back end of Plexus into a separate project, called Xus. We started talking about what such a thing could do. Then the bottom fell out of Plexus. Apparently, the FreePastry project is winding down. It was, in my opinion, the most promising of the major peer-to-peer platforms. It was straightforward and relatively small. We chose it over JXTA for our communication in Plexus. We actually started with JXTA, back in 2002, but JXTA was just too over the top with the excessive design patterns, the large surface area, the lack of a usability layer, and things of this nature. Why does Sun seem to delight in requiring so much ritual from developers to do the simplest things with their libraries? So Pastry is way cleaner than JXTA. Like JX...

This post on Scala-lang talks about research done on how the style of language affects productivity (the time it takes to understand other peoples' code). It is specifically comparing Java with Scala. Here is the paper that the post refers to. Scala allows functional programming, as in Scheme, as opposed to procedural or object-oriented programming, as in Java, but Scala allows a nice blend of the two, which is a unique approach among programming languages. Yes, there was LOOPS and CLOS, but Scala's approach is quite different and I think it's much a more integrated one. There seem to be more and more posts out there about the importance of functional languages. Personally, I agree with the premise: that functional techniques lead to denser code and that can be (if used properly) easier to understand and maintain. Actually, this is related to one thing that I emphatically agree with the eXtreme Programming camp on: don't use accessors unless absolutely necessar...

Dot #1: Lambda Calculus... My wife and I took a vacation recently and I had a chance to learn some more Lambda Calculus; how the Y-combinator works, in particular. At Purdue, we focused on Turing Machines and either we didn't really cover LC or I slept during that part. If you haven't, I HIGHLY recommend learning LC. Lambda Calculus is the most elegant system I, personally, know of (maybe that's not saying much). You functional-types out there will already know this next part, but here's some history and stuff. It was invented by Alonzo Church, who was Turing's Ph. D. adviser (later they proved that the Lambda Calculus and Universal Turning Machines are equivalent, which was one really impressive feat). The Y-combinator is a way to define recursive functions using only lambda binding. Lambda binding is very simple and it's pretty much what Lambda Calculus is. It more or less just lets you assign values to variables and then use them in an expression, lik...