The best 'The best X of 2010' of 2010

Here you have a bunch of rankings about best * (whatever) of 2010.


fogus' best things of 2010

switched.com best-technology-writing-of-2010/

review comparing most successful oodb of 2010
Top ten algorithm preprints of 2010

great papers from 2010, and before :)


14 R posts, with statistics and datamining stuff inside


Bye, and see you in next posts.

PLOP Loops Over PLOP

Quines, like JAPHS, are great hobbies for us, little riddle-solvers.
Here are the 3 most amazing quines I found lately.

third order quine . And here's a SO post discussing a bit about it

ruby rotating earth quine

The new kid on the block. Judge yourself.

For those who didn't bother to google or wikisearch, here's a quine guide

And here, a lisp quine that shows the greatness of simplicity.

((lambda (x) (list x (list 'quote x))) 
 '(lambda (x) (list x (list 'quote x))))

PS: This post is under 'mis cosas' (personal) tag, because there's much more than programming involved in the mind process to understand these things. So yes, quines are a cool concept even IRL.

Text Driven Development

As I already posted, I got a new job in Barcelona, doing mostly apps in Rails (particularly ubiquo, cms)

Luckily, the company is pro-gnu, so I can use linux with all my usual configs. Using ratpoison in a double screen is an awesome experience.

For the moment I lived between the two worlds (gnome vs ratpoison) because I'm continuously asking things to more experienced people, and they usually want to use the mouse when they are on my computer. And I haven't configured everything yet.

Outlines

Last week, I was assigned a project and was given a 100+ pages document with the functional analysis of the project. First thing to do was reading it and making good outlines of it to create a mental model of the program.

I decided to use emacs org-mode to do the outlinings, and probably the TODOs and Schedules. IT's pretty neat, and doing everything with text files gives me a kind of relief, that everything is under control. In fact, that's one of the things that gets on my nerves about pharo. Being able to use your well known tools in a synergic way is great (IMHO)

UML

After that, I created an UML class diagram.
"We use argouml" someone said. Well, argouml has improved amazingly since the last time I tried it, but honestly, for me it doesn't cut. It has some kind of code generator (for java) and some design-critics, that seem cool enough to use it, but given that the web development constrains you to use minimal oop features, I could not listen to the design-lint.

After finishing the damn UML, I looked for other tools that could do pretty UML diagrams from ascii. And they do exist. Great! I'll try to use them the next time. I think plantuml is a fairly good option and, guess what? you can integrate it in emacs.

Slides

On the other side, on wednesday, I did a talk at smalltalk.cat about pharo regexes. The slides where presented in a terminal, in plain ASCII, using a small app borrowed from fxn. Btw, the talk went pretty well. Very informal and kind of simple for people versed in regexes (smalltalk regexes do not have any special unique feature but the opposite, a bit simple IMO), but I think maybe 30% of the people didn't know about regexes and used them just copypasting, so I extended my talk to touch some more theoric side, and in the end, I think everyone learned something.

Btw, if you feel like implementing a regex engine for smalltalk, you can get ideas from this paper. A good read IMHO

HAHA! You're not regular anymore!1

Via HN I saw praprog released another magazine, this one fully dedicated to ruby (What a coincidence! :) )

I skimmmed all the articles but paying more attention to a couple of them:

One of them talk about new features of Ruby 1.9.2. It seems ruby is getting faster and faster on every release (a good thing since speed is one of the major 'problems' I had read about ruby).

Another place where it has improved is on the regex side. Now ruby regexes allow named captures (feature added to perl in 5.10 IIRC), and recursive regexes (The not-so-regular regexes are here) there are some flags like /x /g and /k, that let you reference captures more easily than plain old \1, \2 ...

All in all, quite cool stuff that makes me feel a bit more at (perl) home.

Unfortunately, I couldn't practice with rails yet. I did some progress on ruby koans though. A busy week in Tenerife.

I'm a LOL programmer (wannabie)

In my new job, it seems I'll be writing ruby (on rails).

I've been trying the language in my spare time, and it seems a fairly good compromise between Perl and Smalltalk.

Except a couple of features or idioms I saw, everything else was quite intuitive or easy to understand (at least coming from Perl/Smalltalk).

+ Sigils do exist, but denote scope oposed to type.
+ __DATA__
+ '=' can be part of a method name. And there's some magic involved there. def method=(attr) can be used as an assignment (sintactically) as parens are optional.
+ Integer class can be expanded or subclassed.

Here are the codes I wrote to grasp the language. These are the usual examples I write in every language I try to learn:

- a program to center paragraphs.
- guessing number
- Network with hosts that pass messages one to the other.



Here is a link that I found useful about ruby patterns and idioms.
http://scriptlandia.blogspot.com/2009/02/design-patterns-in-ruby.html

Last but not least

I'm leaving my current $work, and changing to another one. Being the first one I'm starting not as an university student but a 'professional' one feels strange, and I'm somewhat thrilled. Will I be good enough for the job? I hope so :)

These last days I'm reviewing some of my old code with the guy who will inherit my codes. A cool programmer, with lots of knowledge I wouldn't expect from an average young programmer (it's actually a bit older than me but, you know... not everyone reads 'refactoring', code complete, and GoF just for fun :) ). We've had good times. Transfering info would be quite more difficult without such a good learner. In little less than a week, he also explained me some ins and outs about some agile methodologies, or good programming practices (some cool refactorings, Log4X modules, etc...). We both learned quite a lot from each other.

Some of the neat advices that I liked.

- use Logging modules. They pay off. And they are quite easy to set up (opposed to what I thought)
- refactor any piece of code that is repeated more than 1 time (if it's easy to do). calling a simple join(',' , @array) three times in the same function can be refactored into a meaningful name sub. You get the name explaining what your code does, and if you want to change ',' to ':', only one change does it.
- Codes that you write separated by 2 newlines, like paragraphs, and start with a comment that explains what that snippet does, are screaming for a new function. You can use the first words of the comment as a hint for the function name.
- Take a look at AOP, it's cool. a really cool thing.

I'm in ur shell, watching your repos

I'm using more and more a little script that Cornelius called cpans.sh (for cpan search)

It's dead simple, but great anyway, and, it lets me use ratfinder to browse cpan modules. And to give credit where the credit is due, I'll just embed his gist.



Simple idea, neatly used. curl, file tests, zgrep and some bash bits.