archives

Free logic books

I seem to recall seeing this list of free logic books mentioned here, but since I can't find it I guess it won't hurt to (re)post the link.

Clojure’s Mini-languages

A nice blog post about "little mini-languages" that form part of the syntax of Clojure.

jsMath support?

Hi,

Would it be possible to add support for jsMath to the LtU install? It would be nice to be able to put some \Gamma, \tau and \vdash into posts and comments....

Ada Lovelace Day

Hi Everyone,

March 24, 2010 is Ada Lovelace Day. This means that almost 2000 of us have made a pledge to blog about a woman in science of technology.

I've picked a more quite member of the Array language community Ferranti's Girl

Happy Ada Lovelace Day!

Jean put dire comment on tape

C’est à dire, Jeanne a placé un commentaire affreux sur ruban. A pretty neat example of double coding, if you ask me.

Saw it mentioned in A Box, Darkly: Obfuscation, Weird Languages, and Code Aesthetics, an amusing piece of new-media scholarship that reëxamines the notion of beautiful code by surveying a spectrum of weirdo languages ranging from the relatively pleasant (if rather ancient) INTERCAL or Chef to the downright hellish C++ [PDF, 10MB] and Malbolge.

The authors reserve the more conventional term esoteric for such weird (but soon-to-become-dominant) languages as Prolog and ML, and prefer the term weird for such esoteric languages as Brainfuck. The paper builds on earlier attempts to apply the techniques of literary theory to the task of defining programming as an aesthetic practice. Previous such attempts were apparently too narrow in scope, for they failed to explain why anyone would spend years of their life trying to write a program in a language that is best approached as a cryptosystem and whose Turing-completeness remained in question for a few years.