Grammerjack

I just noticed (while reading the 4chan prog forum for the first time) that Paul Graham has put up a web site for his minimal Lisp language Arc: http://arclanguage.org/ The language looks like a nice quiet Scheme-like Lisp dialect. And it has a nice tutorial , as you would expect from a Paul Graham language.

3DMark is a GPU/CPU benchmark used by PC gamers to measure system performance. Here are some great charts showing What GPU/CPU/RAM/OS/Screen size gamers have, and how it's changed over time The best bang-per-buck for GPUs and CPUs My home computer system is very weak compared to these charts, except in one dimension, which is that my 1600 x 1200 display puts me in the top 10% of gamers. Woot! While many people (myself included) have switched to laptops and/or all-in-ones, if you're planning on building a new desktop, check out the Ars Technica system guide . The guide does a good job of speccing out a "Budget Box", a "Hot Rod", and a "God Box", and it's updated every quarter.

Currently I'm reading up on the following computer languages: Python - fun, easy to learn, batteries included Boo - fun like Python, but with macros and type declarations so that it can run fast. Erlang - very brief code. I'm impressed by how concise the Wings3D source code is. Typed Scheme - Scheme with type checking. (Could in theory run fast.) I may try implementing my old "Dandy" game in these languages to see how they feel.

Ever since I've upgraded to Apple Macintosh OS X 10.5 Leopard, I've run into problems using the Darwinports "port" command to install new software. The problem is that for some reason the version of GNU "patch" that I have installed in /usr/bin/patch is version 2.5.8, and it doesn't operate the way that Darwin ports expects. A typical error message is: ---> Applying patches to erlang Error: Target org.macports.patch returned: shell command " cd "/opt/local/var/macports/build/_opt_local_var_macports_sources_rsync.macports.org_release_ports_lang_erlang/work/erlang-R12B-0" && patch -p0 Command output: Get file lib/toolbar/src/toolbar.erl from Perforce with lock? [y] Perforce client error: Connect to server failed; check $P4PORT. TCP connect to perforce failed. perforce: host unknown. patch: **** Can't get file lib/toolbar/src/toolbar.erl from Perforce Error: Status 1 encountered during processing. The work-around i...

Yesterday I wrote a web scraper. A web scraper is a program that crawls over a set of web pages, following links and collecting data. Another name for this kind of program is a "spider", because it "crawls" the web. In the past I've written scrapers in Java and F# , with good results. But yesterday, when I wanted to write a new scraper, I though I'd try using a dynamically-typed language instead. What's a dynamically-typed language you ask? Well, computer languages can generally be divided into two camps, depending on whether they make you declare the type of data that can be stored in a variable or not. Declaring the type up front can make the program run faster, but it's more work for the developer. Java and F#, the languages I previously used to write a web scraper, are statically typed languages, although F# uses type inference so you don't actually have to declare types very often -- the computer figures it out for you. In order to scrape ...