David Acevedo's Blog

We are in the middle of a computer programming languages explosion. In the last few years, a slew of programming languages have come into their own, others have been revived with new expressions and a whole bunch of them have been born anew. Also a new modality has appeared of the polyglot programmer, that is a programmer that works in multiple languages. This last change is the most significant. Because for a long time programming was dominated by a very few select group of languages: C, C++, Java and C#. All of which are related. And dominated by a tool set like Visual Studio with C# and Visual Basic. Now that is no longer the case and things are for the better. Recently I taught myself how to program and want to highlight a few books that are good reads. Most books in programming fall into a trap, that is they don't teach programming at all, but instead teach only the programming language. That's like teaching someone the rules to America Football and expecting them to a...

A few days back I got a code challenge for a cool job position. For whatever reason the test was very light on Rails very heavy on JQuery, which I didn't know much about frankly. So in less than 24 hours I had to not only learn enough of it but also make it work into a modal window widget. I got it done, but it wasn't elegant at all. I clobbered it even if it worked. The first challenge was to get information into webpage from a Rails application, I chose JSON and thought it'd be easy-peasy, but transferring a JSON object is a cross-domain script violation and most browsers won't let it pass. So I learned about JSONp which wraps the JSON object in a JQuery call-back. Lacking the easy Ruby ways of determining what things are, at first I'd no idea what the JSONP object was and just had my Rails app send JSON. Once I figured what it was, it was trivial to get Rails to do it. All I had to do was add: :callback => params[:callback]  to the format property in the con...

I was reading Avdi's post on a new programming langauge designed for learning called Grace, like Skitch, LOGO and others before it, it fails. It fails because computer language designers keep looking in the wrong place. In the PDF on their presentation they discard python because it has "inconsistent method syntax" like that is a point of contention in learning a language. Look at normal speaking languages. Are they consistent? Heck no. They're full of exeptions and irregularities. The more regular the easier it can be to learn yes, but irregularity doesn't equal difficulty. Some irregularity is expected. The number one thing a learning language needs to be is readable . It's like the difference between html and markdown . HTML is simple, consistent and easy to understand but it's near unreadable. It's deeply nested, it's interrupted by obtrusive markup and closing tags. While markdown is eminently readable. That makes it easy to learn. So la...