The Careful Programmer

I participated in the Cloud Robotics Hackathon in Montreal at the beginning of March.

It was my first hackethon and it was great. I registered with two friends, Alain & Benjamin. We joined forces with 3 strangers, Aurélien, Renaud & Stéphane, who turned out the be not only competent, but decent friendly persons.

The scene :
a human is working on his computer while a robot is standing idly by.

Robot: Hey! I've got a joke for you.
Human: Not right now. I'm busy. Aren't you supposed to do the laundry?
Robot: Seems to me you're not so busy as not to be chatting up about your dirty clothes.
Human turns around to stare are at Robot: You're starting to annoy the crap out of me. You know?
Robot: Well, there's no robotic law against that.
Human: I'm gonna write one.

Redline Smalltalk is a file-base Smalltalk targetting the JVM. I've posted about it before.

Some of the goals are outlined here: Why Smalltalk on the JVM?

If you'd like to watch and listen a presentation about it: The journey So Far.

I've been unable to go though my programming books lately; I can't find the energy to read it all or do the exercises.

I finally picked up Practical Clojure and it's a perfect guilt-free book: small and no exercises 8)
For some reason the first chapter did not flow very well for me, but every chapter after that is concise and readable. They really managed to boil down every important concept of the language without losing its essence. It's Clojure distilled!

Ok, I was starting to comment on this blog post and it got ridiculously long:
What's wrong with Clojure syntax?

Clojure definitively has more syntax than Scheme and it is one of the reason I like it. A little syntax goes a long way. I guess we all have our own preference of how much syntax we like in a programming language.

What's that? Pffft!
If you're a bit like me, chances are you dismissed a great technology at its beginning. I remember reading about Python in some OO newsgroup, being really interested, and then reading about required indendation and losing interest immediately. Fast forward a few years later, Python is all the rage and I missed the chance of being there from the start.

Most of the games I like are puzzle-oriented, with a couple of action ones.

Let's start with the classical ones.

The Sudoku application from Mighty Mighty Good Games has the best interface of the ones I tried. I also actually thought I was pretty clever solving the expert level of the normal version until I bought the Expert Sudoku version and realized I sucked even at the easiest level. Their puzzles are hand crafted and often have a pleasing symmetrical quality.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to do a smallish (15 minutes) presentation of Clojure to Montreal.rb called Clojure for Rubyists.

I think it went neither terribly bad nor terribly good. I included a section about software transactional memory at the end of it, but in retrospect it was too hard (for me) to explain it well and quickly. I should have gone with Java interop instead.

Ever since I've received Stuart Halloway's Programming Clojure, I've been reading, watching and listening about Clojure. And dabbling with it a little.

A few months ago, I started learning Ruby. My main learning experience has been The Ultimate Book to Ruby Programming by Satish Talim and his free online class Core Ruby.

There's a new Sherlock Holmes series on BBC One. It's simply named Sherlock.