Now this is absolutely hilarious. A randomly-generated computer science paper has been accepted to a conference. Not just that, but the grad students behind the program that generated it are raising money so they can attend and deliver a randomly-generated talk.
Read the paper and you’ll probably burst out laughing.
If you don’t know much about computer science, it may look shockingly real.
Cliff’s memories of Easter are a great read.
A study showing that a significant number of people exhibit violence towards their computer when it malfunctions, and another significant number of people attempt to sweet-talk it.
Shapr posted a link to the extremeperl mailing list. I found this post on the value of learning languages to be insightful.
Along a similar line, there’s an intriguing post on The Sequence from a Perl hacker looking at the Haskell community. I think he’s right.
These Perl people are really impressing me lately. My respect for the Perl commnuity has really shot upwards lately. And I am similarly disappointed in many of the directions Python is taking these days. Nice time to be using Haskell :-)
Usually when I learn a new programming language, I’ll hang out on its mailing lists and IRC channels, learning from the answers given to other people’s questions, and asking my own. After a month or two, I usually feel fairly good with my abilities; that I could answer most of the questions, and understand most of the questions.
Well, I’ve been using Haskell for about 6 months now. I really like Haskell, and it’s a great language to use, and it’s already my preferred language.
But here’s what’s unique about Haskell. The more I use it, and the more I participate with the Haskell community, the more I realize just how much there is that I could learn. And it seems that I’m not alone with that feeling.
I wonder why Haskell is unique this way.
I’ve started a new Drupal site, The Haskell Sequence. Its focus is on news and discussions relating to the Haskell programming language. People seem to be enjoying it so far.
Why Does Windows Still Suck? from the San Francisco Gate. Mark Morford asks the question: why do people put up with Windows? Unfortunately, he can’t find an answer.
Spamhaus on MCI’s tolerance of spamming.
Marty on ER runs and contesting speeding tickets.
Also, I released a new program yesterday: MissingPy. It’s a link between Haskell and Python. This marks the fifthh major language link to Haskell, after C, C++, .NET, and Java. With my Python library, I was able to add bzip2 support to Haskell in under 10 lines of code. Sweet. This one binding knocks out most of the things on my todo list.
Things I want to do in Haskell:
Newsforge has a nice article about Debian From Scratch, my Debian install-it-yourself CD, rescue CD, and CD builder package. I must say, Bruce Byfield’s instructions are more complete than my own documentation for it.
I now use DFS for most of my new Debian installations. Best of all, porting it to new archs is trivial.
Debian’s Haskell packages have been stuck out of testing for some time. I learned that they’re going in today, though, finally! There are also several other packages that this will push into testing, including my own MissingH.
Here’s an interesting read from Joel on Software: Advice for Computer Science College Students
Here’s an interesting page on the Python wiki: PythonVsHaskell. It seems a lot of Haskellers come from a Python background. It’s a remarkably fair piece, although both the Python and Haskell example code are poor examples of language features.