Everyday language

The limits of my language define the limits of my world.

Wittgenstein

Lists in a few languages

Ruby

list = [1,2,3,4,7,8,11]
puts list
list << 13
list.each do |x|
  puts x
end

Python

list = [1,2,3,4,7,8,11]
print list
list.append(13)
for x in list:
  print x

Objective C

NSMutableArray* theArray = [NSMutableArray array];
[theArray addObject: @"1"];
[theArray addObject: @"2"];
[theArray addObject: @"3"];
NSEnumerator *enumerator = [theArray objectEnumerator];
id obj;
while ( obj = [enumerator nextObject] ) {
     printf( "%s\n", [[obj description] cString] );
}

Java

list.add ("13");
for (Iterator it = list.iterator (); it.hasNext ()) {
    String s = (String) it.next ();
    Sytem.out.println (s);
}    

and something from Shakespeare that I would have totally misread if it wasn’t explained to me in a biography that I’ve been reading the last few weeks -

Golden Lads and Girles all must,
As Chimney-Sweepers, come to dust.

Shakespeare

Golden lads are dandelions, and chimney-sweepers are dandelions which have gone to seed. The book is by Peter Ackroyd, and is quite interesting but a bit dry really, particularly contrasted with the words of the poet he’s talking about.

New websites

Another new site I’ve been involved with designing this year is the RouteBuddy one – RouteBuddy is a GPS program for OS X, which you should check out if you’re interested in mapping on OS X.

The view of Ben Tee from Faichem

My favourite view up in Invergarry

Ben Tee at night

The same mountain on one of the warmer nights at Christmas

Rails 2 months in

Working with Ruby and Rails has been a really fascinating learning experience, and a joy to use. Having written a website generator in Ruby (which I still used for this site instead of paying for proper hosting :), it’s interesting to contrast the methods used and see what other advantages of the language have been capitalised on.

I’ve heard good things about seaside too, but didn’t like the ugly session storage in the urls. It’s nice to see some other frameworks getting a boost from the popularity of things like Rails and Django, and marginalised languages like Smalltalk getting a boost from the interest in Ruby.