An incapacitation of options

An incapacitation of options is a terrible thing.

Jython, Frank Wierzbicki

Frank Wierzbicki, who has taken over as prime Jython mover from Brian Zimmers has started a blog. Subscribed.

Onelook, wildcards and reverse lookup

My favourite dictionary and yranoitcid onelook is back and can do more useful stuff than I rememberit doing before such as wildcarding. Recommended.

Open XML formats for Word Processor Documents and Literate Programming

ODF - the future of literate programming?.

I think the possibilities here are very interesting. By and large, we write programs in text editors. That immediately creates problems in creating good documentation. Not easy to throw in the odd diagram. Not easy to segment the contents hierarchically and stick a TOC at the top. Not easy to footnote the code. Not easy to cross-ref one part of the code to another. Not easy to include the spreadsheet that holds the master decision tree etc. etc. etc.

So why not knock out your code in say, OpenOffice, use paragraph styles to indicate what parts of the text are really code. Then feed just the code bits through to your compiler or interpreter?

Why stop there? Why not make import statements in programming languages smart enough to recognise zipped XML Office notations when they see them?

Just a thought.

IronPython cometh

Jim Hugunin, the daddy of both IronPython (Python for the .NET CLR) and Jython (Python for the Java JVM) demos IronPython.

You need a dynamic programming language. You work in both .NET and JVM environments. You want to learn one bag of tricks and use it in both. BUT you want to know that you can step out of the box and access the .NET environment in its entirity (GUIs, .NET libs etc) and the Java environment (Swing, Beans and what not) in their entirity when you need to.

One word: Python.

Randomness is just an illusion created by a point of view...

and its antipode: 'order is just an illusion created by a point of view', both spring to mind looking at this number spiral of the prime numbers. [Via Information Aesthetics].

Math isn't really my bag but I dig patterns. Figure 5 is spooky. Many many moons ago I was in Chicago, writing 8086 assembly languge routines to overlay number spirals onto time series of financial futures price data. I thought it was nuts at the time. It probably still is nuts but now it is nuts two levels further up the concept chain than I was operating at, at the time.

Nailing jellyfish to bicycles

"Pinning down the terms/phrases we want to agree on is like nailing jellyfish to bicycles. It is difficult to do, provokes strong reactions and leads to some pretty surreal moments. Our putative shared understanding is like a flotilla of wine bottle corks, bobbing on the turbulent seas. Sometimes we see them clearly, other times they disappear from view. Who knows where they have moved to now?" -- In the Beginning was the Naming Convention