Squeak & Pharo on Raspian

Raspian (Debian for the Raspberry Pi) comes with a fairly recent version of the Squeak virtual machine (CogVM). Here's what the Pharo One-Click image looks like on the Pi:

It's still painfully slow. The good news is that Lars keeps working on the JIT compiler for ARM even though GSoC is over. Yay!

Roman Numerals ...

... are lame. But!

Dynamic bindings vs. laziness in Clojure

Now here's a thing that cost me quite a while to figure out: dynamic variables easily get in your way when accessed from lazy expressions. What happened to me is that a lazy expression using a dynamic var wouldn't remember the value of the dynamic var after leaving its binding form before the lazy expression was actually evaluated. It is only a slight relief that people more skilled than I have run into that problem, too. 

So I guess a bunch of things in the language are not exactly simple.

Expressiveness (1)

Pieces of code that make you go "wheeeee". Today's snippet is from Joe Armstrong's "Programming Erlang" (2007), p. 54: How to generate all permutations of a list:

perms([]) -> [[]];
perms(L) -> [[H|T] || H <- L, T <- perms(L--[H])].

Post of Awesomeness

In this post, I'll collect a number of talks, papers, videos etc. that I find inspiring and worth sharing. It's mostly a personal log of things I've seen or read (or skimmed and want to dig into later ;) ). It is by no means complete and will grow over time.

Papers & documentation

- Ungar, Smith: SELF - the power of simplicity (esp. Figure 5)

- LISP 1.5 Programmer's Manual, Appendix B (LISP evaluator)

- Richard P. Gabriel: Better Science Through Art

- Joseph Hellerstein: The Declarative Imperative

Talks

- Dave Thomas: Why Modern Application Development Sucks!

- Sam Adams: Parallelism + OOP = Big POOP? (STIC '12)

Pieces of software & demos
- Thinglab by Alan Borning (video)

Simplicity, design
- Why Guido thinks reduce is evil - as much as I like functional, he's right

Going viral: Lively on GitHub

The Lively Kernel is now on GitHub. Lauritz, Robert and I spent the past few weeks cleaning up modules, tests etc. This is an important move towards portability and it will make it easier for everyone to have their own local installation, try stuff and contribute.
In the wiki, we also explain what has been done so far and what you can expect to be done in the future.
We announced the git repo just a few days ago. Based on the reactions we got until now, it looks like we are picking up some serious momentum. Which is a great sign, given that Lauritz and I are entering the last of our internship. (And it causes a weird mixture of sadness and excitement, at least for me.)

Anyway, go ahead and clone us: https://github.com/rksm/LivelyKernel

Five finger keyboard

Here's what I just came across on Slashdot. Doug Engelbart's five finger text input method is now available  for Android and the iPad: http://labs.teague.com/?p=1451.
The main reason I'm posting this is not that I'm terribly desperate to use it. It's to let you know that if you just went "Doug Who?", then this is a great time to read the Wikipedia article about him.
Have fun.

Plastic Bag Ban in Santa Clara County

When I went to get my Sunday night candy, I learned that Santa Clara County is getting even greener. No more free plastic bags as of today (few exceptions)!

http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/Plastic-Bag-Ban-Starts-Sunday-136475448.html

By the way, happy 2012!