The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Friday, Debtember 21, 2007

An interesting idea in programming environment

Oh my … now this is brilliant, although you may need to watch the video to grasp the full concept.

Now, before you click on that link, let me warn you it's about a new programming language/paradigm, based upon a two-dimensional way of programming (although, oddly enough, even a two-dimensional programming language isn't new).

It's a neat idea, and the development system presented in the video incorporates ideas on what an IDE should do for you. I can also see using a similar tool that might solve (or at least, points towards a solution) a particularly thorny programming problem that still lacks a good name. How I envision the solution to that as-yet unnamed problem is a list of objects across the top of a table, all possible actions down the left side, and at each intersection, you supply the code to handle that object with that action.

Hmmm … using a spreadsheet as a programming editor …

Forever stumbling across Unix commands

Man, I hate when this happens—I'm browsing around on the Intarwebs, when I come across a reference to what appears to be some obscure Unix command only to find it's been around for close to thirty years now.

Sigh.

That's what I get for not bothering to read up on the 3,300 commands available by default on your typical Unix installation (found by simple invocation of find `echo $PATH | tr : ' '` -type f -perm 755 | wc -l—ain't Unix wonderful?).

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