SCID

Source Code In Database. This was actually a passing reference at the very end of a humorous essay listing ways to write Java code that ensure your continued employment (i.e. writing easily misunderstood code). The essay is copied to a place not its original home, because frankly its original home is oddly formatted and broken up into multiple pages, and the copy was all one readable text extent.

But following that link brings you to this oddly-formatted list of excellent things you could do if you were dealing with a system that actually understood your code. Refactoring on the fly, as it were, because you've stored at least part of the code at the conceptual level instead of at the pure syntax level.

Very thought-provoking indeed! Some of them are sheer brilliance, obviously written by a guy who has done a lot of maintenance programming.

Programming the Lego RCX and NXT

The RCX and NXT are little embeddable processors for robots control. There's a lot of RCX/NXT hacking information out there. Great RCX page here, and two languages, NBC and NQC.

Oh, what a tangled web we weave

... when first we practice to hashtie variables and then try to refer to those hashes in the setvalue for a node at a different level and forget that they're hashtied when building our freaking debugging print statements and get into a loop for that reason alone.

Sigh. Talk about your heisenbugs.

Blow-by-blow comparison of AI in a couple of languages

Fun article on implementing a Connect 4 engine in functional and imperative languages and wrapping it in a framework to play it. Nicely written up!

Logic in Computer Science

Another free PDF book. I kind of wish I'd had this fifteen years ago.

Update Nov. 15, 2011: link's dead. That's a shame.

Growing Tree algorithm for maze generation (JS)

Nice programming article.

Programming is hard

Ha. Also, the Turkey Test. From an HNN thread about this post, which discusses this paper - and that paper is pretty interesting.

"TDD problems" - statements of interesting small programming assignments

Here's an interesting page: a list of interesting programming problems for people who want to learn test-driven design. I'm not going to flat-out say it would be good to have an automated program that could program from those statements, because that would be crazy. But it's certainly instructive to contemplate what such a nonexistent system might look like, and chew off bits around the edges.

Some links

Some things I'm finding useful:

Template Toolkit in Perl

Perl's Parse::RecDescent - actually, I'm surprised how long I lived without this one.

A little article along the way about judging C/C++ comments for readability using Parse::RecDescent and Lingua::EN::Fathom.

Then I found a bunch of stuff about PHP's session variable and how to implement login systems in PHP, some using Ajax.

I registered the domain "sproggler.com", for some nebulous future semantic-programming-online service. One probably shouldn't register speculative domains late at night.

Higher-order Perl

Might as well use this blog for bookmarking programming-related things.

So: Higher-Order Perl.