Zaemis

After dabbling a little bit on day 1, I dedicated some time on day 2 to skim through Go's language spec and standard libraries . A lot of it didn't have much relevance to me yet because I hadn't begun to play with those parts of the language. What caught my eye though was that Go supports the \v escape (obviously no one at Google has read Stop the Vertical Tab Madness ). Welcome to 1963, folks. In addition to tweaking how loops are written, Go has augmented the traditional syntax of if and switch statements too. I don't see the enhancement providing as much benefit as I do with for . It's almost as if someone decided to let people move the placement of if up a statement earlier just to be different, and it certainly doesn't read well. x := recover() if x != nil { ... } vs if x := recover(); x != nil { ... } The list of available packages is rather impressive considering Go has been available for a year. Some packages are pretty standard, like math and...

Go is a general purpose systems programming language developed at Google by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson. Go has been on my radar since it became publicly available a year ago as an open source project, and since then its documentation has been improving and a small community of users has been forming around the language. Last week I had some time off from work that coincided nicely with the Thanksgiving holiday and I thought it'd be fun to spend some of it looking at Go. Here's the first in a series of five posts that share my thoughts and experiences of spending a week with Go. My first Go programs were solutions to a couple Project Euler solutions. This was just to get a basic feel for its syntax. Problem 1 package main import fmt "fmt" func main() { sum := 0 for i := 0; i < 1000; i++ { if i%3 == 0 || i%5 == 0 { sum += i } } fmt.Printf("%d\n", sum) } There are a few oddities, but ove...

A coworker stumbled across Gartner's top 10 technologies for 2011 and decided to share it with everyone in the office via email. Overlooking the need for a cluebat , and resisting the urge to similarly spam everyone with The Oatmeal's take on email etiquette , I think Gartner missed the mark on some things. Let's be honest for a moment. Cloud computing has been hyped since '08 when Eucalyptus and Amazon's EC2 Services came out. Social media has been on the radar since since blogs became popular (though admittedly Twitter and Facebook upped the ante). Mobile computing has been slowly making inroads but I think it's still too soon to claim "The PC era is over." All the technologies have been around for years in one form or another; they just happen to be "hot" right now... and by the time someone starts touting them they've probably peaked. In the next 12 months I predict there'll be a lot of potential for things like IPv4/6 netw...

~- is known as the inchworm on a stick operator in Perl obfuscation circles. It isn't really an operator; it's a term coined to describe negating a value and then taking its compliment, the apparent effect of which is to decrement the value. (To understand why, you need to understand how negative numbers are represented in binary.) In Perl, ~- works for positive values: for ($i = 3; $i > -3; $i--) { print ~-$i . "\n"; } $ perl test.pl 2 1 0 4294967295 4294967294 4294967293 Interestingly enough, when the same is tried in PHP the results are slightly different... 2 1 0 -1 -2 -3 PHP treats the value as a signed integer where Perl treats it as an unsigned integer. I don't know which way is "better" or which is "more correct," but it is something I found interesting and I thought would be worth sharing.

I wasted more time golfing this week than I should have. No, not real golf... code golf . Trying to write small programs in the least number of keystrokes can be fun, challenging, and sometimes even addicting. It's not about writing pretty code or code that's easily-understandable. It's all about cramming as much code as you can into the least number of characters. While some languages golf better than others, you can still write impressively small code in your language of choice if you're familiar enough with the intricacies of its behavior. Here are 8 tips to improve your golf score when golfing with PHP: Use short tags. Using <? instead of <?php and using <?= instead of <?echo will both save you 3 characters. Avoid initializing variables if possible. Uninitialized variables assume the value 0 , "" , or false depending on the context in which they're referenced. $x=0; is 5 characters too much! Know your function aliases. A few...

I remember when Java first came out surfing the Internet on my 28k dial-up connection and hitting a page with a Java applet ; either Netscape would come crashing down or my computer would lock up... I remember schoolmates telling me Java was "the future" because it ran on a virtual machine which meant it was cross platform, and then being ostracized by them when I pointed out that QBasic would be considered cross platform , too... I remember reading Java programming books before I understood OOP and wondering why I had to write a hundred lines of code just to output "Hello World" ... I remember reading Java programming books after I understood OOP and still wondering why I had to write a hundred lines of code just to output "Hello World"... I remember trying to convince myself every time I started Eclipse and watched my P4 run slower than a 486 that I just hadn't given Java a fair shake and I needed to embrace it with an open heart and mind....

The PHP development team released PHP 5.2.14 last week and with it comes the end of active support for the 5.2 branch. A bit of dissent rippled throughout the community... but is it really a big deal? Contrary to popular belief, downloads from php.net don't come with an expiration date. There is a lot of legacy code running mission-critical applications. These apps work and are stable so the time, effort, and expense required to upgrade them put doing so very low on a companies' priority lists. A few years ago I worked as a System Administrator for a credit union turned bank; the core processing system was written in PL/I and the ATM switching system was written in COBOL . There are probably more applications written in non-OOP PHP 3 code with register globals running atop a Linux 2.4 kernel than any of us want to acknowledge. But version numbers are just mile-markers that reference a snapshot of the project at a given time. The development team is continually improving PHP...

I'm not quite sure exactly I was searching for, but somehow I serendipitously stumbled upon the site learnprolognow.org a few months ago. It's the home for an introductory Prolog programming course. Logic programming offers an interesting way to think about your problems; I've been doing so much procedural and object-oriented programming in the past decade that it really took effort to think at a higher level! I found the most interesting features to be definite clause grammars (DCG), and unification. Difference lists are very powerful and Prolog's DCG syntax makes it easy to work with them. Specifying a grammar such as: s(s(NP,VP)) --> np(NP,X,Y,subject), vp(VP,X,Y). np(np(DET,NBAR,PP),X,Y,_) --> det(DET,X), nbar(NBAR,X,Y), pp(PP). np(np(DET,NBAR),X,Y,_) --> det(DET,X), nbar(NBAR,X,Y). np(np(PRO),X,Y,Z) --> pro(PRO,X,Y,Z). vp(vp(V),X,Y) --> v(V,X,Y). vp(vp(V,NP),X,Y) --> v(V,X,Y), np(NP,_,_,object). nbar(nbar(JP),X,3) --> jp(JP,X). pp(pp(PREP,N...

Traditionally, unobtrusive JavaScript means the code is kept separate from the page's markup. This separation makes it easier to maintain and reuse the code. However, I view unobtrusive code as more than simple separation. True unobtrusiveness means your JavaScript code will function alongside other code that may be loaded by the browser, and the other code will function alongside yours. Don't pollute the global scope in the execution environment; don't clobber global objects, their properties, or prototypes with your own; and be able to work alongside various frameworks.

Code metrics are interesting creatures. Some are just raw numbers, such as depth of inheritance or lines of code, while others are a bit more subjective, like a maintainability index. But ultimately they are all meaningless without broader context and an understanding of the code. As a brief example, consider the following C# function which accepts a string and returns the 40-character hexadecimal representation of the string's SHA1 hash . public static String Sha1(String text) { using (SHA1Managed sha1 = new SHA1Managed()) { Byte[] textBytes = Encoding.Unicode.GetBytes(text); Byte[] hashBytes = sha1.ComputeHash(textBytes); return Convert.ToBase64String(hashBytes); } } The function accomplishes one task. Variables are defined closest to their usage. Function calls are clear and do not nest other function calls. Even using ( ) is used so the run-time can automatically dispose of the SHA1Managed resource. Yet a scan using Visual Studio 2010 ...