This just in: Google will host an Android press gathering at its global HQ on Jan. 5 ….
Presumably, the event will have something to do with the company’s Nexus One, an Android phone that Google plans to sell on its own Web site and perhaps through T-Mobile as well.
Via Digital Daily
One of the distinguishing characteristics of Unix is the philosophy that “everything is a file” (taken even further in Linux and Plan 9). Reading the interview with Ken Thompson in Coders at Work (page 465) sheds some light on why this is the case:
Seibel: So you basically wrote an OS so you’d have a better environment to test your file system. Thompson: Yes. Halfway through there that I realized it was a real time-sharing system. I was writing the shell to drive the file system. And then I was writing a couple other programs that drove the file system. And right about there I said, “All I need is an editor and I’ve got an operating system.”
So Unix started life as a glorified test harness for Ken’s file system! Amusing…
C functions may be used recursively; that is, a function may call itself either directly or indirectly. Uninquiring souls may take this as just another peculiarity of those C folk, of whose ways their neighbours speak little to outsiders but much among themselves.
I’ve been working on adding paredit.el like structural editing to the next version of the La Clojure plugin for Intellij IDEA. IDEA already does most of the paren matching stuff (automatically inserting a closing paren when you type an opening paren and so on). So far I’ve got the basic barf and slurp commands working, and splicing, as you can see in the screenshot below:
The next step is probably to make IDEA’s expand selection code be a little smarter in the face of s-expressions. In related news: I found a good introduction to paredit.el on SlideShare which may be of interest. I’ll try to get the guys at IntelliJ to push out a new version of the plugin after the 9.0.1 release is out (it’s in beta now).
I’ve been following Tim Bray’s excellent Concur.next article series covering approaches to concurrency in various languages, and currently (no pun intended!) covering Clojure. The latest article talks about a super efficient log parsing implementation done by Alex Osborne an includes the following comment:
Lots of the performance wins come from dipping into Java-land (AtomicLongs, LinkedBlockingQueue), which is perfectly OK, but a Clojure purist would probably see those occasions as maybe highlighting gaps in that language’s coverage.
I’d take issue with that, one of the real strengths of Clojure it that it has easy and fast access to the whole Java ecosystem. As Rich says:
Clojure is designed to be a hosted language, sharing the JVM type system, GC, threads etc. It compiles all functions to JVM bytecode. Clojure is a great Java library consumer, offering the dot-target-member notation for calls to Java.
That seems pretty clear to me. I wonder if the people claiming to be Clojure purists are all coming from a Lisp background rather than the Java world?