Tag Archives: programming

Law of language elegance

Posted by on 25 July 2007 17:27 Comments Off

I read this excellent post on Derek Young’s blog today. In it he discusses the seeming paradox that elegant languages, such as Ruby and Haskell, are not as popular or widely used as the less elegant or plain ugly ones, like PHP and Perl. I found Paul’s comment particularly insightful. And rb’s comment was quite amusing–a good idea though probably impractical at present. At any rate, the post and discussion were very interesting to read.

As a side note, xmonad was written in Haskell. So I’ve got a Haskell compiler now. Maybe I should start learning it… :)

Vim and how to write a worm

Posted by on 26 June 2007 9:36 Comments Off

Being the computer geek I am, I found a few articles that are intriguing to the geeky mind.

On July 26, 1989, Robert Morris, a student at Cornell, was indicted for releasing the Morris worm. This computer worm, one of the first ever created, played on several UNIX security vulnerabilities and infected thousands of computers once it was released. I found an article by University of Utah professor Donn Seeley, which describes how the worm was built. It was a fascinating read.

I also came across a few articles on Vim, my favorite command-line text editor. It can do amazing things. This website discusses using Vim efficiently, working with multiple files, and customizing the vimrc file. I’m putting these links here mostly for my own benefit, but perhaps someone out there shares my love for Vim…