A comment on the Security Now Podcast got me thinking about the concept of write-only languages. Many times over my career, I’ve heard people refer to a language as write only. The implication being that no one can read the code once its written. This phrase does not refer to some magical IP technology that… Read More »
Back in February, I ran across the post robkinyon on Perl: How useful is a debugger, really? and was again reminded of the great debugging debate. I thought about commenting on it at the time, but I got distracted. Well, Matt Trout reminded me of it again today with his post Simple Debugging. So, I… Read More »
In the past few months, I have been focusing more on SVG. The most important reason was the SVG Open 2009 conference the first weekend of October.1 Some truly amazing demos and research are being done in this area despite nay-sayers claiming that the technology is dead. Some of the biggest announcements leading up to… Read More »
There has been a lot of talk lately about projects moving to git. So far I the write-ups from people converting to git have all been glowing endorsements of the new one, true way. There’s almost a religious fervor related to the subject. Since my experience has not been quite that good, I thought it… Read More »
In my last post, I talked about a quick little project that has grown into experimenting with several new tools/processes. I finally got a reasonable release out on CPAN as SVG::Sparkline version 0.30. This version supports 6 different sparkline types: Area, Bar, Line, RangeArea, RangeBar, and Whisker. It also has better documentation in the form… Read More »
For the last few weeks, I’ve been working on a Perl module for creating Sparklines* in SVG. The original purpose of the project was a demonstration of working with SVG from the Perl programming language. It was intended to be an example in a talk I was going to give for our local Perl Mongers… Read More »
The comments from Ian and rlb3 have made me think a bit more on what I said last time about Chronistic Coupling. One thing I didn’t make perfectly clear is that I’m not advocating avoiding Chronistic Coupling at all costs. Any real system will require some amount of Chronistic coupling. The key design point is… Read More »
Many programs have a need to store program state to disk at various points. An approach used by many of these programs is to serialize the objects representing the program state directly to disk (or a database). Back in 2004 (XML-Serialized Objects and Coupling), I described a coupling problem caused by automatically serializing objects to… Read More »
I was listening to an older episode of Software Engineering Radio where they interviewed Martin Odersky on Scala (Episode 62). In the interview, Odersky made a comment about closures being the literals of functional programming. This statement struck me as surprising. The more I thought about it, the more interesting and subtle the concept became.… Read More »
My son has talked several times about learning to program, but he’s young enough that the normal programming approaches bore him. I had tried implementations of Logo in the past, without much success. A couple months ago, I was checking the Make magazine blog and stumbled upon an article about a Scrolling Mario game in… Read More »