Tuesday, April 20, 2004

An old Time magazine article on Bill Gates:
In Search of the Real Bill Gates

http://www.time.com/time/gates/cover0.html

 

A write up on Ruby by Matz himself:
The Ruby Programming Language

http://www.informit.com/articles/article.asp?p=18225&seqNum=2
The following is the outcome of a simple longest-word search program over
      /usr/share/dict/words (409067 bytes). These were tested on my Pentium-200MHz
      Linux machine.

Program

Lines

Seconds

Ruby

14

1.046

Perl

15

0.593

Python

16

5.001

As stated before, Ruby is a bit slower than Perl because of the overhead
      for method searching; however, it's much faster than Python.

 

 

Groovy programming language, reputed to be a lot Ruby like:
http://groovy.codehaus.org/

Groovy is a new agile dynamic language for the JVM combining lots of great features from languages like Python, Ruby and Smalltalk and making them available to the Java developers using a Java-like syntax.

(Groovy Entry)

 

Codehaus

Finally a project site that encourages the need to commercially use projects

http://codehaus.org/

The Codehaus differentiates itself from other similar efforts in several ways. The Codehaus places a firm priority on the production of useful code, and less on non-coding exercises such as voting, committee-forming and proposal-writing. Each project is provided autonomy to organize as it wishes and to address its own customer concerns and requirements directly. Codehaus is not entirely open to any and all projects. Projects must be sponsored or introduced through an informal manner by an existing haus-member and deemed to be "interesting".

 

Codehaus aims to support commercially useful projects, and thus does not sponsor or assist with projects licensed under the GPL or other business-hostile licenses.

 

 

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP)

If you are a fresher or are getting started on programming, or like thinking about programming I highly recommend reading the SICP.

http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/

"I think that it's extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing. When it started out, it was an awful lot of fun. Of course, the paying customers got shafted every now and then, and after a while we began to take their complaints seriously. We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful, error-free perfect use of these machines. I don't think we are. I think we're responsible for stretching them, setting them off in new directions, and keeping fun in the house. I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun. Above all, I hope we don't become missionaries. Don't feel as if you're Bible salesmen. The world has too many of those already. What you know about computing other people will learn. Don't feel as if the key to successful computing is only in your hands. What's in your hands, I think and hope, is intelligence: the ability to see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it, that you can make it more."

 

Alan J. Perlis (April 1, 1922-February 7, 1990)

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