Part One of a series on the theory and praxis of parsing and lexical analysis. Here, we cover the basic theory of formal languages and explain the fundamental concept of grammars. My apologies to...
This essay explains the core goals and meaning behind why I write here. Despite the distraction of my virulent disdain for closed source software, the most important point you should take away if...
When I first started playing with Erlang, I immediately noticed something, perhaps reflecting a more nuanced view of programming languages that I have slowly started to grasp over the past few months....
MQL must be one of the most overused acronyms in todays technology field, including (but definitely not limited to) such specificities as search/analytics, automated trading, and molecular substructure...
PHP is flawed. Deeply, immensely so. I first discovered this over a year ago, when I made the naive assumption that PHP 5.1 had fixed a lot of the language level failings of its predecessor. Because...
Python 3.0a1 release hits the network, with significant backwards incompatible changes. The best way to describe this is a shedding of the snake's skin, sloughing off a whole bunch of weird ambiguities...
I hate to agree with grouchy old Dijkstra, but unfortunately now it's impossible to deny: BASIC is what killed my ability to be a truly great programmer. Dijkstra was right, GOTO completely rots your...
There's a tide of opinion suggesting that PHP is threatened with extinction as standard hardware begins to favour widening multicore processors. This would be a fair argument if PHP was a general...
John Rose talks about implementing support for tail call optimization in the JVM. I've been waiting for this one, as in my mind, it has long been one of the biggest holes in the leaky dike of...
As I am now starting to discover, many of these ideas were originally considered by Alan Kay, and summarized at OOPSLA in 1997. If the true shape of object oriented programming is qualitatively...
It's not a showdown between Javascript and Ruby, it's a race towards bioware. Language oriented programming is not a new idea, but it has taken a long time to become a significant influence on...
I understand the philosophy that developer cycles are more important than cpu cycles, but frankly that's just a bumper-sticker slogan and not fair to the people who are complaining about performance. I...
The writer is doubtless stricken with writers block And can thus, for weeks, vanish into a myriad of dark rooms Where conversation dangles under glistening rows of liquor. The programmer is expected...
Last year, I picked up this curious book which seemed to sum up the zeitgeist of web programming in 2005 - an interesting and polemical twist from O'Reilly
Our formal attempts at understanding language tend to be hierachically structured, but when it comes to actually organizing language, it is well known that meaning is relational and constantly fluctuates....
In response to More Thoughts on How Microformats are Different, I'm starting to wonder if maybe there is room for another proper noun that describes "a specific compound of semantic XHTML units",...
Microformats make sense to me immediately, in a way that RDF never has. By focusing on visible data, the markup retains a high degree of interoperability with existing...
From time to time we take our pen in hand And scribble symbols on a blank white sheet. Their meaning is at everyone's command; It is a game whose rules...
➔ Re: A concise description of Ruby?
➔ narcissus - javascript in javascript
➔ Can programming be liberated from the von Neumann Style?
➔ XML.com: What Are Topic Maps?
➔ How all human communication fails, except by accident
➔ Shirky: Ontology is Overrated -- Categories, Links, and Tags
➔ Abecedaria: Unicode Philosophy
➔ Abecedaria: The Ideographic Myth
➔ 10 Things Every Java Programmer Should Know About Ruby
➔ The Need for Abstract Entities
➔ The Lexical Semantics of a Machine Translation Interlingua
➔ Language Workbenches: The Killer-App for Domain Specific Languages?
➔ lifehack.org » Guide to Grammar and Writing
➔ Attribute Overloading - Defense Modeling and Simulation Office
➔ Xanadu: The Conversation of the Digital Text
➔ Perl, the first postmodern computer language
➔ How Object-Oriented Programming Started
➔ Strong Typing vs. Strong Testing
