PUBLIC MARKS with tag programmation

Of course, "Strunk and White," as the book is commonly called, has nothing to do with software (it was written in 1935) and everything to do with writing: grammar, composition, and style for users of the English language. But in its 100 short pages this book has more to say about the craft of software than many books you'll find in the "Computing" section of your local bookstore.

Each line gets highlighted based on the complexity of the function: green for low, yellow for medium, red for high.

Project: smart.rockets

Date: Summer, 2006

Language: ActionScript 2

Key Concepts: Evolutionary computing, genetic algorithms, rocket science

Project: BC Budget Visualization Tool

Date: September, 2009

Language: Processing

Key Concepts: Data visualization, data organization, sticking it to the man

Project: tree.growth

Date: September, 2006

Language: Processing

Key Concepts: Lindenmayer Systems, recursion, biomimicry

Project: NYTimes 365/360

Date: February, 2009

Language: Processing

Key Concepts: Data Visualization, NYTimes Article Search API, HashMaps & ArrayLists

Threading

We’re quite familiar with the idea of writing a program that follows a specific sequence of steps as outlined in, say, a main() function. A Thread is also a series of steps with a beginning, a middle, and an end. A thread’s sequence, however, can run independently of the main program. In fact, we can launch any number of threads at one time and they will all run concurrently. Visit the Java site for a more involved explanation.

This is incredibly useful when it comes to data mining, as we can have separate threads retrieving different pieces of information from the network. If one gets stuck or has an error, the entire program won’t grind to a halt, since the error only stops that individual thread. To create independent, asynchronous threads, we simply extend the Thread class.

Project: GoodMorning!

Date: August, 2009

Language: Processing

Key Concepts: Spherical coordinates, latitude & longitude conversion, Twitter API, MetaCarta API

When it comes to releasing source code, I’ve always been torn. I really believe in the philosophy of open source, but I’m intimidated by putting my code out there for everyone to see. Underneath it all, I’m probably scared of being exposed as some kind of a charlatan (”You call that programming?”). So, to pre-empt that possibility, I’ll start by saying this: I’m not a great programmer. My code is clean and fairly well-structured, but don’t expect to find any particularly advanced code wizardry or complicated mathematics. I do, however, think that the projects that I’ll be sharing over the week contain some good ideas, and a lot of helpful techniques. Hopefully you’ll find one or all of them useful.

OSCON talk that was a survey of language constructs for concurrency.

answer Right. And it results in a type of error that doesn't teach you anything. You have chaotic errors where all you can say is, "Boy, this was really screwed up, and I guess I need to go in and go through the whole thing and fix it." You don't have errors that are proportionate to the source of the error. And that means you can never have any sense of gradual evolution or approximate systems. So, the real difference between the current idea of software, which is protocol adherence, and the idea I'm discussing, pattern recognition, has to do with the kinds of errors we're creating. We need a system in which errors are more often proportional to the source of the error.

Io is a small, prototype-based programming language. The ideas in Io are mostly inspired by Smalltalk (all values are objects, all messages are dynamic), Self (prototype-based), NewtonScript (differential inheritance), Act1 (actors and futures for concurrency), LISP (code is a runtime inspectable/modifiable tree) and Lua (small, embeddable).

This article investigates some other metaprograms which, perhaps, we don't really notice, and some alternative metaprogramming techniques which, perhaps, we should be aware of.