Posts filed under “Uncategorized”

Oyster at the NWE.pm Hackday (pt1)

Mark Keating has already blogged in detail about the NorthWestEngland.pm Hackday 2010 from a social & logistic point of view, and I’ll just agree here that it was indeed awesome in the true sense of the world! Instead, I’d like to wrap up some detail about Oyster itself, the project that about a dozen of […]

Spreadsheet imports: imperative vs. functional

I’ve been prototyping ways for customers to import data into our system. While some kind of JSON/XML structured data would be easiest for us, our customers like spreadsheets. That’s cool of course, and it’s easy to mock up imports like this. Product Price Category Brie £ 2.00 Dairy Chablis £ 5.00 Wine Of course not […]

Github language statistics

I enjoyed Aldo Cortesi’s rather interesting post about language statistics on github. He’s done some good analysis, and there are some interesting nuggets of information to be had about Perl, Haskell (though fewer, as there are only 18 projects that made his criteria) as well as other languages. Of course, there is some silliness there […]

Undone – sci-fi comedy on BBC radio

Just a quick post about this cute scifi-ish radio show, Ben Moor’s Undone. Someone pointed me at it a couple of years ago, noting that the protagonist Edna Turner reminded him of the lovely Sally Sparrow from Blink. I loved the wordplay, the surreal alternate reality (for example, “Los muchachos que necesitan la insulina, Mexico […]

London Perl Workshop tomorrow!

I’ll be at the London Perl Workshop tomorrow: it’s a free 1-day conference, and was lots of fun last time I attended. I’ll be talking on “Functional Pe(a)rls”, an extended and updated version of the talk I gave at the Italian workshop, and I’ll be discussing Sub::Curried and Monads in Perl. See you there ;-)

Some thoughts on Python

I’ve never studied Python, but I’d quite like to at some point in the future. It seems very much like Perl with a different set of design criteria. Yeah, there are differences, but compare with C, Lisp, COBOL, and you can see why Perl and Python are clustered together in the “P languages” (Perl/Python/P^HRuby etc.) […]

Two cultures of interactive fiction

One of the questions in a recent survey on rec.arts.int-fiction asked if we preferred “story” or “puzzle” interactive fiction. Though it’s not as much of a binary choice as the wording implied, there are two extremes of a continuum, and many people have a preference towards one end or the other. I’m not a very […]

Hello world

I’ve enjoyed using Vox.com over the last couple of months but I’m finally taking the plunge and moving the blog here to greenokapi.net/blog. Though I’ve occasionally wanted more flexibility, the trade-off with a hosted service is that you waste no time tinkering, the only thing you can do is write. But the fact that Vox […]

Chapter 9: More about Higher Order Functions (part 2)

Ex. 9.9. I banged my head against this exercise on fix for far too long. I've confused myself enough times trying to understand “The Why of Y” paper that I have this silly idea that fixed point combinators (if that's the right terminology) are somehow hard I don't think that setting the question with the […]