May 12, 2013

programming is terrible: HTTP as Imagined versus HTTP as Found

On the left is a pristine network diagram. On the right is how most networks look in practice. This isn’t to bemoan the death of cable lacing, but an illustration of what Richard Cook calls ‘Systems as Imagined’ versus ‘Systems as found’ (stolen from his excellent talk, How Complex…

May 9, 2013

‘Anklebiters’ by Satellite High
got it all in the bag like I’m rakin’ leaves

May 6, 2013

lazyweb me programming language recommendations?

SWM looking for a programming language with the best available combination of (in descending order of priority):

good support for dynamic code generation;
good support for sandboxing evaluation — ideally, e.g., building LISP-like environments and then executing subprograms under those environments rather than under the environment the top-level program is running under;
a type system that allows me to bind new behaviors to data objects after they’re created with minimal fuss;
an execution model / conceptual dogmatism that doesn’t make me want to tear my hair out;
reasonable performance

things I’ve looked at so far:

C# on .net 4.0 with the DLR and Roslyn: reasonable, but requires lots of code (and Roslyn is still a CTP);
Ruby: Ruby seems to have like a billion sandboxing gems, a lot of which have native components or are particular to MRI or JRuby, and I’m not sure any of them are any good;
Erlang: seems OK but most people’s approaches to sandboxing seem to occur at compile time rather than execution time, and execution-time sandboxing seems to require alternative VMs(?);
PyPy: haven’t actually tried to mess with PyPy yet, but sounds promising;
Haskell: yeah I know Haskell can do all this, but please don’t make me use Haskell :(

any suggestions?

May 6, 2013