Three.js

Bloody hell! Three.js is cool. And CSG.

What can't you do in the browser these days?

Bret Victor's Code / Drawing IDE

Excellent video

I'll have more to say and think about this.

Wat

This is very funny.

A survey of bizarre behaviours of non-things in Javascript.

Rails Off The Rails

Seems like the same thing has happened with Ruby on Rails as happened with, say, Zope.

Giles does a pretty good analysis. The key point is that as frameworks mature they start supporting legacy users and applications who, in turn, have different requirements and values from those looking for a quick way to build new applications.

Permutations with Python Generators

Here's something neat.

I wanted to experiment creating different permutations of a collection of items. (In fact I'm working on some code for laying out shapes on a surface.)

Prototyping in Python to get my ideas straight I came up with this neat generator solution.

SpimeScript

These days, I'm thinking a lot about 3D printers, desktop manufacturing and software to create physical things.

Last year I did some art pieces using software to generate drawings for laser cutters and 3D printers, and I'm continuing along the same line. I want to move this stuff into the browser, and the combination of CoffeeScript and Raphael.js is turning out to be pretty good for this. (Did I mention I really, really like CoffeeScript?)

I also dabbled a bit with Prolog, wondering whether it can be used as a high-level description language for machines or other complex objects. The really interesting question is if you can use the built-in inference engine of Prolog to help with the design. (Aside, here's a silicon layout engine in Prolog) I haven't got very far with that yet, but I'm now considering how Prolog can be combined with or made to output OpenScad (or PyScad) code.

A couple of days ago Simon Wardley posted on his blog that he was searching for a SpimeScript :

So, I want to return to ... the formation of Spime Script. We're entering a phase where hardware will become increasingly as malleable as software which leads to a problem of choice - if I want to change the function of something, do I do this in software or hardware? The tendency today is obviously towards software because its more malleable but the future is never the past. However this creates a problem of skill - will I need to become proficient in both software and CAD / electronic design?

In reality both CAD and whatever software language you use, compile down to instruction sets and the function of the device is the interaction of these instruction sets - one which is substantiated physically and the other which is substantiated digitally.

Turning this on its head then why not write the function of what you want, the function of the device? Compilers can therefore undertake the complex decision trees (which is what they're good at) required to determine what element of that function is encoded as physical and what element is digital.

A future language is needed, something whereby the output is both physical and digital and I describe merely the function of what I'm after.

That's a really exciting vision.

Now, here's what I think is really important for a SpimeScript.

It should learn from HTML / CSS.

While HTML / CSS is a pain in many ways, there's a very interesting insight in it about design. That design comes in layers. It's partly about the separation of logical structure and visual style. It's partly about the cumulative effect of the Cascade in Cascading Style Sheets. It's partly about the fact that the browser has reasonable defaults for the geometric properties of logical structure. (Today, those defaults look rather out-of-date but there would be little to stop a browser manufacturer making their defaults look more like Readability or Twitter Bootstrap.)

So here's the main feature request for a SpimeScript. It should be possible to define the logical structure of, say, a machine and have some layout-engine give it plausible default geometric properties. But it should also be possible for designers to layer optional design hints on top of that layout in the form of extra constraints and have the engine deal with fitting them together.

As with the silicon design case, there must be some prior art here, but I'm not quite sure where it is. Electronic Design Automation maybe.

SqueekNOS

SqueekNOS is a project to create an operating-systemless Smalltalk. Ie. one where the Smalltalk machine replaces most of the operating system (apart from a small kernel I guess).

The nice thing about this : everything is inspectable / hackable. All the way down.

CoffeeScript

Just a note. I am really, really liking CoffeeScript now.

It's reminding me both of freedom that Python gave me when I first turned to it after Java. And bit of my experience with Erlang. ( If only it had Erlang's Actor model and pattern matching arguments ... )

The other good effect of this, CoffeeScript is making me more comfortable with investing my time writing serious logic on the browser-side. Which is where it should be, given the requirements of modern applications and that the browser is becoming the default GUI. 

Programming in Go

Very interesting video about how to program with Go language.

Horizontal Applications And Popular Data Structures

Joel Spolsky : "The great horizontal killer applications are actually just fancy data structures."

WaveFlavours

So, slight Christmas / New Year's diversion from my main projects - I've been writing a wave-table synth in the last few days. Code (C++ using Maximilian) is here.

The main thing I'm doing is to have two wave-tables for a voice, and then slowly swap sample points between them to get a long-term evolution of the sound. I want to get a rich and ever changing timbre cheaply ie. without having to use filters or expensive FFT.

Chicago Boss

Very nice looking Erlang web-framework.

UI Stencils

Clever idea. Stencils for UI designers.

Guess you can make your own with a laser-cutter.

Defending Lean Startups

Got into a long comment on Nick Pelling's blog. He's sceptical about Eric Ries. I'm fairly neutral, but here's my response to Nick.

Surely all practical knowledge is anecdotal and, therefore, an unwarranted step from the particular to the universal. All advice in this “genre” (Tom Peters, Charles Handy, Seth Godin etc. etc. etc. ) comes with an implicit health warning. And anyone with any experience of the world will apply salt as a matter of course. 

Should we hold that against Ries in particular? 

So his models come from the software industry. OK. But someone else’s advice will come from banking, or food retail or oil or the military. Each with some parallels to your business but each with its own idiosyncrasies as well. 

One thing you can say in favour of Ries’s bias is that more and more things are getting automated and so more and more of our world “is made of software”. Software processes are replacing other kinds of process that were embodied in administrative or managerial practices or hardwired into physical machines. In this world, improvements in software are often more effective than improvements in other areas. 

You’re a coder yourself. You probably know your Mythical Man Month etc. You know perfectly well that software doesn’t benefit from heavy bureaucratic management. But that exciting and effective software usually does come from small, enthusiastic, “agile” teams. 

So, if software is becoming an increasingly important factor in business. And software thrives under agile conditions, it would follow that business in general will probably benefit from agile. 

Disclosure : I’m a software guy myself, so I’m totally down with the land-grab programme.

HackerType

Possibly one of the more hilariously idiotic things I ever saw online. Impress your friends with fake coding skills. WTF?????

Teach Programming In Schools

A petition to the UK government.

Mind Traffic Control Bug

A recent change in Mind Traffic Control introduced a bug preventing those who weren't already logged in from logging in. This is now fixed.

CoffeeScript and Raphael.js

I've been working on a project based on some of my recent artistic works. I thought I'd do it using a Processing sketch embedded in a web-page. It's not that I was particularly happy with Java applets (in 2011!) but I figured I'd make use of the Processing code I already had.

After a whole lot of faffing around trying to get the applet talking to my server, I'm realising that this is really NOT going to fly for a whole bunch of reasons. I wasn't really seeing Java as my long-term future anyway, but I've realised that it isn't even going to be the quick, dirty but workable prototype that I'd hoped. So, if I have to make a break, I might as well do it now and quickly. And look to the future rather than the past. So I've made a decision to rewrite with CoffeeScript and Raphael.js. (I'm generating SVG designs anyway, so Raphael is ideal.)

After a spending a couple of hours today, that's feeling like good decision. There's still the hassle of having to convert a lot of code, and it's a bit of a fiddle going backwards and forwards between the editor, the command-line compiler and the browser. But CoffeeScript feels like a good language. Obviously meaningful whitespace indentation is comfortable for a Pythonista like me, and I'm getting used to the Rubyisms without too much pain.

Not much in the way of debugging information, which hasn't bitten me yet, but might. Still, I'm positive.

RIP John McCarthy

John McCarthy has died.

Discussion on Lambda the Ultimate.

Linux Commands For The Web

Can't remember if I saw this before, or if I posted it, but it's beautiful.

One of my favorite business model suggestions for entrepreneurs is, find an old UNIX command that hasn't yet been implemented on the web, and fix that. talk and finger became ICQ, LISTSERV became Yahoo! Groups, ls became (the original) Yahoo!, find and grep became Google, rn became Bloglines, pine became Gmail, mount is becoming S3, and bash is becoming Yahoo! Pipes. I didn't get until tonight that Twitter is wall for the web. I love that.

Marc Hedlund via Coding Horror

The Future of Arduino and Android

Very interesting talk by the creator of Arduino about their plans for integrating with Android.

Verpa's Gmail lib

Playing with this library to access my Gmail account via IMAP. Seems pretty simple and convenient, though fairly basic.

RIP Dennis Ritchie

Forget Steve Jobs, the guy who invented C has died!

BEACHhtml on GitHub

It's kind of trivial, but I put the html generating code that I mentioned in this post into GitHub. Mainly because I wanted to be able to share it between a couple of different projects and it made sense to use a Git submodule.

So here it is.

Google's Dart

So Google's Javascript replacement language, Dart goes public.

Looks awfully like Java with a smattering of CoffeeScript. I like the empty compact constructor and the one-liner functions. But I'm not sure what those colon ones are doing.

Presumably some jQuery-like action with the document.query().

Looks a little bit messy, but then Javascript has got kind of messy. Shame they didn't try to go for the CoffeeScript cleanness.

In a sense, it may be rather similar to writing Processing if they produced a decent IDE.

On the whole, I think I can live with it.

Some interesting evaluation at Lambda the Ultimate.

How GitHub Scales Its Culture

Good explanation of the GitHub culture, built, as you'd expect, around asynchronous pulling.

Shhhh ...

I have a confession ...

I re-installed the Google App. Engine dev, environment on my machine. I popped open the Mind Traffic Control codebase and looked into it. I was a bit overwhelmed at the clunkiness of some of the code (I've become a more concise Python programmer since then) but I realised I could still make sense of it.

I tweaked a couple of minor appearance bugs and refreshed the server.

It worked!

It's been a long time since I actually had a working MTC development environment.

I wonder what this means ...

Google's "Future of Javascript"

So Google blame Javascript's weaknesses for Apple's success with iOS and its app ecosystem, and want to replace JS with their own alternative.

Obviously I think this is the most wrong-headed thing I've heard in a while, and a worrying sign of idiocy within Google.

I'm not particularly concerned about the future of Javascript which I'm sure will be around  long after Google's alternative is abandoned.

Trello

Trello looks very interesting.

Lunascript looks very interesting.

Going completely against the spirit of what I said yesterday, Web2py looks interesting.

Been browsing some interesting discussion over at Quora on how they built their site.

It's basically Python and Pylons. But this is cool. They don't use a templating language.

Here's developer Charlie Cheever :

What "templating" means to most people is a way of having the developer write out HTML basically the way that you would send it to the browser and then having a way to include a few things -- typically variable substitution by using special tags lik <% ... %> or similar.

In our case, no one writes any code that looks like HTML/XML literals, so there's nothing in our codebase that really matches what most people think of as templates. We do have view code but that interleaves calls into the model and application logic along with a Python code description of what the HTML for that component should be, which is different from templates which are usually based around the ideas of separating logic and data fetching from this.

This sounds like an approach I've been favouring for a while. I did it in Mind Traffic Control, some other unreleased SdiDesk in Python experiments, and I do it in some Javascript I've written. People think that you should separate HTML from code because HTML is the domain of designers and code is for programmers. But I think HTML is the realm of data-structure (designers should stick to CSS) and part of the programmers' remit.

The way a programmer (or at least, this programmer) wants to express complex data structures is with function composition. So here's an example of my html.py file.

# HTML library
# basic level 

def tag(name,x,*argv) :
 if x is None :
  return u"<"+name+u"/>"
 if argv != (None,) : 
  inside = u''.join(argv)
 else :
  inside = u''
 if isinstance(x,dict) :
  # we're passing a dictionary of attributes for the tag
  s = u"<%s " % name 
  s = s + ' '.join(['%s="%s"'%(k,v) for (k,v) in x.iteritems()])
  s = s + u">"+inside+u"</"+name+u">"
  return s

 # or there are no attributes, just inner
 return u"<"+name+u">"+x+inside+u"</"+name+u">"


# Now we'll actually make some tags
tags = ['html','head','body','script','p','div','table',
        'tr','th','td','ul','ol','li','dt','dd','h1','h2',
        'h3','h4','h5','h6', 'style','pre']

loc = locals()
def setit(loc,t) :
 loc[t] = lambda x=None,*argv : tag(t,x,*argv)

for t in tags :
 setit(loc,t)


# Use like this 
html(
    head(),
    body(
        h2("Header"),
        p('para1'),
        p('para2')
    )
)

But I did start to wonder, given the prevalence of templating languages and some of my recent experiences as a Django developer, whether this wasn't just me being wilfully perverse / crazy. I admit I'm kind of relieved to read that Quora are doing something similar. Maybe I wasn't so mad after all.

Bonus link : Decomposition by language is probably a modularity mistake. (Written back when I was more confident.)

Why Programming Languages?

Back writing more Prolog and getting into Definite Clause Grammars. Having a parser generator built into the language is sweet. :-)

How could I have missed this guy commenting on Oli's Semantic Programming?

Dunno ... but I did.

Funny : Analogue literals in C++.

See post on Composing about Kill Math, dynamical systems visualisation.

Compare spreadsheets.

Designing a software "atelier".

Google's Cloud Robotics

Someone else with the disease. :-)

Nice Quora question about code at early Google.

What I take away from these stories is that pushing out ugly prototypes of your products will not prevent you from building a world-class engineering organization in the future.

Bloody hell, Prolog can be frustrating sometimes!!!!

Doh! I may have been a bit previous in saying that I'd got the hang of Prolog syntax.

Awesome response from SWI-Prolog when you just query an unbound variable. :-)

?- X.
% ... 1,000,000 ............ 10,000,000 years later
% 
%       >> 42 << (last release gives the question)

Wow! Playing with Prolog at the moment. It's awesome.

I seem to have finally achieved some kind of fluency instead of fumbling around without knowing how to drive the thing. It probably helps that Erlang has accustomed me to the syntax and other conventions.

At Aharon's prompting I had a play with node.js over the weekend. It is very good. I can see why it's "the next BIG thing". (See the nice starter tutorial with a very impressive minimal twitter reader.)

Trying to think of something fun to do with node.js now.

Also, what with getting into Urbi, "events" are clearly the trend of 2011 for me.

Resolver Systems have a new "cloud-based" pythonic spreadsheet called "Project Dirigible"

Urbi is a great, parallel, event driven language for programming robots.

Watch the tutorial video.

Absolutely packed with interesting control structures to handle the implicit parallelism and event-driven nature of the language. Several important ideas : free subsumption architecture (you actually run many different programs in parallel, each dealing with certain motors and sensors, but interacting with each other only through the body of the robot; "blending" modes which let different programs send multiple instructions to the same motor at the same time; "tags" which let you interact with (start, pause, stop) running processes by name.

An idea for an Android GUI designer.

Interesting to see the state of the art here. It's an improvement on XML ... but still, not as far forward as you'd hope.

Amazing, this genre of Xtra Normal tech. conversations. Here's a strangely hilarious, profanity filled discourse on NoSQL.

Sweet! Emacs on a touch-screen.

Zounds!

Pharo is a smalltalk that runs on iOS and has a wiki-app.

I like the look of the Clay programming language. C with variants.

Looks like Staticmatic is Rubyland's solution to the problem that inspired GeekWeaver.

There may be something in Zed's analysis of the decline in contributions to free-software projects.

Food for thought.

(Of course ... people could just be excitedly writing iPhone apps.)

Import question. Is anyone currently using SdiDesk? Write in the comments if you are.

I'm getting an error message on Mind Traffic Control :

A server error occurred. Please contact the administrator.

First time I've seen it is tonight, but if anyone else is seeing it and it persists, then please tell me in the comments.

Update : OK, seemed to have fixed itself pretty quickly.

Update 2 : Not that I seem to have a lot of regular users of MTC.

SO, BASICALLY, IT'S LIKE A
ECO-FRIENDLY MARKETPLACE
FOR
ERLANG ENTHUSIASTS!

If only ...

TwitterSheep is entertaining.

Great talk on TDD, Ward Cunningham and what killed Smalltalk.

The end of Google Wave?

How to write an interpreter in one day.

ThinkLinkr, another pretty slick web-based outliner.

Finally, Oli resurfaces with a blog about Semantic Programming, SemProLa and issues of programming the semantic graph.

Added to my blogroll of course ... and I'll be following here.

Watch that space!

LULZ : Did Google just re-invent Visual Basic?

Now, if they'd also made it do Yahoo Pipes-like stuff, *that* would have rocked.

Mark Bernstein :

It's easy to add generality to a spec. It makes you look really smart, especially when someone else is going to do the coding. But too much generality too soon makes the code age prematurely; you can get old, brittle, confusing code that looks like it's yellowed with age, even though it's not even finished yet.

The Smart Disorganized reboot is still in progress ....

Today, a sad story about GeekWeaver.

A couple of weeks ago I needed to revamp Gbloink!'s web presence. Quickly. And, I was in no position to do it in GW. So I fired up a copy of WordPress and made : Gbloink!

I also needed a new OPTIMAES site. And one for Gisel.

You spot the trend? The answer to "how do I knock up a decent-looking site? fast?" is to use WordPress. I'm seriously thinking of doing it for my own homepage too.

Obviously, these are the kinds of scenarios for which I envisaged GeekWeaver. So what's gone wrong?

Several things :

- I got over-ambitious. The basic GeekWeaver as templating language, worked great. But I wanted to make it into a full sophisticated Lispish sort of a functional programming language. That side-tracked me into several attempted rewrites before I shelved it with other unfinished projects.

- The OPML Editor worked great in Windows XP. But was horrible in Vista. And now I'm using Linux most of the time. I can run it under Wine, but it feels clunky to do so. So I don't have a decent OPML editor. There are still, surprisingly few outliners in Linux, and still no convenient outline editing widget for the browser.

- Great templates are the real win. An earlier version of GeekWeaver shipped with decent free template I got from somewhere or other. But I'm not a good HTML / CSS designer and I could neither adapt it to my changing requirements nor really design another. I guess the answer is to work with a designer. But as one of the proposals for GW was to make web-design more "programmer-friendly" (by introducing the programmer's favourite tool, abstraction, to HTML) that's rather a contradictory point. Chalk one up to web-designers and one against GeekWeaver.[1]

- Moreover, it's hard to compete against a rich ecosystem like WordPress. Among thousands of templates and plug-ins from dozens of contributors, are some pretty damned good ones.

- Also, while GW had a couple of sprinkles of syntactic sugar to make authoring XHTML / XML in the outliner a rather pleasant experience, the outliner is merely OK for CSS and not really all that good for javascript. (For a real programming language, it's useful to have the standard syntax checking, bracket counting, line numbering etc.) As web-pages are increasingly made of CSS and javascript over and above the HTML, GW is decreasingly useful. To do GW properly, the editor needs to be both a good code-editor AND a good outliner.

So is GeekWeaver a failure? Am I abandoning it?

Well, it's not yet a success, I'll agree. :-)

I still *believe* that there's a niche for a GeekWeaver-like language : something with the quick and dirty characteristics of early Perl or PHP; that let's you get a lot done quickly; and who's philosophy is "templating" at a granularity above the individual page or file. There's no reason that, if I had time and another burst of interest, I might not make further progress taking GeekWeaver in that direction.

But I now have a (more than) full-time day-job writing social software in Python[2] which leaves little time (or inclination) for a lot more experiments in python for web-site making. So GW is definitely on hiatus while I pursue other projects.

Nevertheless, I'm always coming back and thinking what I should do with it. You never know when inspiration might strike again.

[1] This raises another sceptical doubt. Allowing you to define abstractions is meant to make things easier. If it doesn't make "web-design" easier, am I barking up the wrong tree?

[2] In fact, I'm working with Django. Which brings a lot of other concerns and ideas. It was easy to see how GW could compile down to PHP. But would it make sense to try to compile it down to Django?

Interesting testament to Google Wave

I think TidyLines is the best browser-based outliner I've seen. At least in terms of how it feels at the keyboard.

I certainly like the look of CoffeeScript.

Not quite sure what it's for yet. Is it just a nicer looking syntactic sugar on top of javascript? Or are there some powerful abstractions that simplify doing larger scale js work? (a la jQuery?)

XHP actually looks pretty cool. On the surface, it's just a cleaned up PHP. But the cleaning up (putting XML into the language) actually gives it some of the character I was hoping for in GeekWeaver.

The lessons of Mozilla Ubiquity

Giles Bowkett has a profound and entertaining blog-post, starting with some thought-provoking criticism of Joel Spolsky and Paul Graham; and then moving on to other questions of business models for blogging programmers.

Great exegesis of Ward Cunningham's maxim.

Another thing that I saw recently that looks pretty interesting : Fossil, a kind of source-control system with built in web-server and trac-like wiki and bug-tracking, all in a single executable file.

I've no time to play with this at the moment, but it looks very cute.

Wow! Dan Bricklin has still got it.

This is a really nice twist on the mobile notepad / todo list app. The UI looks brilliantly well thought through.

Joel on his "search engine for programmers".

More of Joel Spolsky's smart understanding of "social software" as both social and software. Now StackOverflow evolves to become a smart online CV for recruiters.

SocialCalc comes out of beta.

Growth of a Wiki.

WARNING -- THIS BLOG IS STILL SHUTTING DOWN ... PREPARING FOR REBOOT

EditGrid is going free.

Nice. WikiIsNotWikipedia

And by the same token, Wikipedia is not wiki.

Funny advert just popped up on a Google search :

Work in IT within weeks
Become a Microsoft Engineer Earn £35K+ No Experience Necessary

WARNING - this blog is going dark ...

To return to a theme I started many years ago, I commented on this excellent article about why web-site development has got so damned hard. (And remember when we all thought of web-apps as lighter and simpler than desktop apps? What happened?)

Anyway, here's my comment.

I think the problem is less the multiplicity of programming languages, than our insistence that we should always be separating our languages in different places.

This goes against the basic tenets of cohesion and coupling. We cluster unrelated activities together because they happen to have the same syntactic sugar, while separating tightly-coupled activities because half of them happen on the client and the other on the server. Why the hell should this implementation detail have to be reflected in our architecture?

What I'd like, controversially, is to be able to mix-and-match the languages within the same source file, grouping together the python, javascript, html and sql that actually has to work together in one place. I have no trouble dropping into regular expressions or similar DSLs from inside my main code, why should dropping into a layout or query language be different?

WARNING ... SmartDisorganized reboot coming ....

This is an absolutely brilliant summary of the virtues of PHP.

The important point is that these virtues aren't going away. By comparison this seems to miss the point. In 2020 we won't be programming the web with an advanced Python framework (wonderful as python is). We'll have something which does what PHP did for CGI or Processing does Java, ie. wrap a purpose built, sophisticated back-end (something like Google Application Engine) in a light, domain-specific language. That language won't look like PHP. It would be nice if it looked like Python, but I suspect Javascript is a more likely model.

But it will retain the virtues of PHP : none of this fussy separation of presentation and logic; easy discoverability of where URLs go; fast iterative development; big built-in library etc.


(Hat-tip, BillSeitz for the links)

Dynamic List is a browser-based outliner.

A quick thought ... working with a lot of Django and Pinax at the moment, I'm seeing a lot of use of Python's varargs. Functions that just take *argv, **kwargs

I find I don't like this. I want to see argument lists as explicit as possible. I feel uncomfortable and a bit lost. I feel unprotected when the compiler can't even check the number of arguments I'm sending.

So I wonder if this is legitimate. Or isn't it analogous to the case of static typing? Varargs give more flexibility than fixed arguments. Much as dynamic typing is more flexible than static. So why shouldn't I prefer the power and flexibility over restriction and security in this case?

Update : Of course, this is the way that GeekWeaver works, where there's no explicit definition of the list of arguments passed to a reusable block. I've been unhappy with that there too. Thinking that I should add positional explicit named arguement lists. But if this kwargs thing is a trend, then GW should probably be left as it is.

Two links I need to read but haven't got to yet.

Martin Fowler on Illustrative Programming

Dion Almaer on coding in more than 2-D.

Nowdothis is awesome!

(hat-tip @adrianh)

Of course, if it becomes massively successful and famous I'll be ... kind of ... you know ...

But I really do wish it well.

Playing with simple python access to RabbitMQ today. Looks pretty cool.

My day-job means that I now have a github account.

And I have to say, I am very impressed by it.

I decided on bzr last year as my distributed source-control system, mainly because it felt so similar to svn and it was written in python. In comparison, git is still bloody confusing. But bzr seems to be losing momentum (hg is the pythonic candidate in the race) and git-hub with its YASN-oriented social approach to source-hosting feels way ahead of other repo-hosting services like Launchpad and Google Code or running my own Trac-SVN solution.

So, I'm quite likely to switch my projects over to github in the near future.

PS : Oh, and if felt really cool to just fork my own repo of Folknology's Reactored. Encourages me to start playing with it.

Spreadsheets are 30!

Just created a ThoughtStorms page on ComputationalThinking

How Languages Learn

Analysis of StackOverflow

Javascript keeps rolling on as a language. Now on iPhone

Your business card is crap!