The third and final day with Lua was a fun day. We consolidated what we had learned so far by building a multi channel MIDI player using the RtMIDI library and Lua’s ability to play well with others. In this case C++. Once again, I needed to make a fair number of tweak …

The second day of the Lua introduction is certainly heavier going than the first. We are introduced properly to the data structure that is at the heart of Lua, the table.Tables are efficiently implemented datastructures that can work like arrays or like hashes or like both at the same time. Lua al …

Well, the first day of my adventure has been relatively straightforward and, aided by a little cider brandy, I have finished the exercises.The first of the seven new languages is Lua and the chapter covering it is written by Ian Dees. He compares Lua to Indiana Jones and tells a story of how Lua h …

Back in 2011, I took up the challenge of learning Seven Languages in Seven Weeks. The book is Bruce Tate’s tour through seven of the most interesting languages about.I learned about concurrency models, functional programming and the unique qualities of Ruby, Io, Erlang, Scala, Prolog, Co …

Back in 2011, I took up the challenge of learning Seven Languages in Seven Weeks. The book is Bruce Tate’s tour through seven of the most interesting languages about. I eventually finished working my way through the exercises and blogging about it in early 2012, almost a year after starting. …

The other day on hackernews, this video was posted of Imperial college’s Bob Spence demonstrating the APL computer language. Some of what is being shown is all too familiar, though the analogue nature of the computer interaction is decidedly steampunk. Despite the steampunkiness of …

There was recently a cartoon on xkcd that dealt with ineffective sorts. In the title tag it proposed the stacksort — a sort that searches StackOverflow for sorting functions and runs them until it returns a sorted array. Gregory Koberger liked the idea so much that he implemented stacksort. …

I’ve finally finished myseven languages in seven weeks adventure. Ittook, as I’d oringinally expected, significantly morethan seven weeks, though the actual amount of time which I dedicatedwas only a couple of days more that the amount allocated in the book. It wasjust that the wee …

The last day of my seven languages odyssey has been without doubt the most brain frying of all. I needed to spend about four days of fairly intense study to get close to a viable maze solver. Even now I doubt very much that its anything more than a naïve and buggy implementation. Still, the good …

Well, I thought that I’d have the time to do all the extra credit excercises for Haskell Day Two. But as it turned out I got stuck on the justify some text question. I guess this sort of question gets easier, but I couldn’t get the structure I wanted — a list of two tuples of …