Notes on codes, projects and everything
Previously, I started practising recursions by implementing a type check on lat (list of atoms), and ismember
(whether an atom is a member of a given lat). Then in the third chapter, named “Cons the Magnificent”, more list manipulation methods are being introduced.
Recently I find some of my pet projects share a common pattern, they all are based on some kind of grids. So I find myself writing similar piece of code over and over again. While re-inventing wheels is quite fun, especially when you learn new way of getting things done with every iteration, it is actually quite tedious after a while.
Sometimes, letting a piece of code evolving by itself without much planning does not usually end well. However I was quite pleased with a by-product of it and I am currently formalizing it. So the by-product is some sort of DSL for a rule engine that I implemented to process records. It started as some lambda functions in Python but eventually becomes something else.
Semantic Web always sounds like some magic power stuff that a group of people keep yelling about. Chances are, if one is into web development, he/she would have heard of it somehow or other. However, despite the supposedly wide awareness about it, are we using it? Or rather, am I publishing enough data to Semantic Web? OK, I don’t, but why?
I saw this article from alistapart, which is about Javascript’s prototypal object orientation. So the article mentioned Douglas Crawford, and I was immediately reminded about my struggle in understanding the language itself. Back then I used to also refer to his site for a lot of notes in Javascript. So I went back to have a quick read, and found this article that discusses the similarity between Javascript and Lisp.
After comparing my own implementation of MVC with CodeIgniter’s, now I’m comparing Kohana’s and Zend’s. I have just shifted from CodeIgniter to Kohana recently in work and is currently learning on how to use Zend Framework to build my web-app. As everybody knows, Zend Framework is more like a collection of library classes than a framework a la Ruby on Rails, using MVC in Zend Framework would require one to begin from bootstrapping stage. However, in Kohana, just like other frameworks, bootstrapping is done by the framework itself so the developer will get an installation that almost just works (after a little bit of configuration).
I was invited to try Go (the programming language, not that board game) a few months ago, however I didn’t complete back then. The main reason was because it felt raw, compared to other languages that I know a fair bit better (for example Ruby). There was no much syntatic sugar around, and getting some work done with it feels “dirty”.