OMG! CodeMatch!

CodeMatch is apparently a search-based Eclipse plugin that seems to have organized an unknown number of small snippets into parameterized macros described by pattern-like sentences. As you code, you search for those snippets, and the code is built before your eyes.

This rocks. If it retained the pattern-level semantic information it would rock harder - I wonder if those snippets are open source? This is a service - the snippets are online in their own database and seemingly accessible only through their plugin, so it looks like the answer is no.

The "getting started" page [here] is a good textual rundown of how things work. This is an incredibly fascinating development.

Kind of a milestone

I have Decl templates working today. That only took over a year. There are some fiddly bits I'm still polishing, but - it's a template engine, and it has some special features that make it a good one for me (chief among them preservation of indentation: Pythonic literate programming at last). So it's a good feeling.

Application mining

So a developer puts 200+ hours into an app, the customer fails to pay dime one, and the developer open-sources the app. Classic! Your mission, if you choose to accept it: parse the app.

Well, except it's Ruby on Rails, which is not yet one of my targets. But still - interesting enough to bookmark.

Learning NoSQL

Good article. I should follow its advice.

Website strategy

So for a while I've put strategy kinds of things over on the startup ideas blog. And insofar as strategy regards the underlying business, that's probably a good thing. But some Website strategy is a question of proper deployment - proper design of the environment that a site is operating in. And that should be here, I think.

To that end:

• Agiliq's quick Website checklist [part1] [part2] - part 2 has a list of other checklists.
• A neat trick: Using Adwords to comparison test different names for a service.

OK, so especially the checklist is something that should probably be in a semantic domain. I think really the whole business-process-and-strategy domain should be a Decl domain in some way. Whatever the hell that means for the future.

And certainly some of it should be in a list of deployment patterns/boilerplate.

Requests: Pythonic HTTP

The Requests library in Python is a high-level API for HTTP. Interesting philosophy.

Polyglossia

For some reason, the concept of polyglot programming has been popping up a lot on HNN. So here are a few links:

• Perlis languages: languages that change your thinking about programming
• Rosetta stone for various scripting languages (not to be confused with ... yeah)
• Crashing into Python, a really quick overview of Python. Why did I suddenly stop programming in Python, actually? I don't recall.

Quickstarter

Webapp boilerplate! Rocks! Not the tech I'd choose, but it's a sweet idea. [about] [hnn]

CLI musings

And just as my attention was drawn back towards CLIs, here's an article about why they're important. CLI = API = extensibility. (Which is not to say that some higher-level support wouldn't be welcome in a standard CLI interface, but still...)

Noloh

Oh, look, another attempt to do what I'm doing. Noloh: "Not One Line Of Html". A PHP-based extension/framework/whatever.

Scripting CLIs

I got the crazy idea I should script Putty. It doesn't look amenable to scripting, so ... I had the idea of maybe doing something in Perl, and ran across Net::CLI::Interact, which looks frankly fascinating.

Web testing

There is a hugely vast array of Web testing tools, even free ones. Seriously. BadBoy is an example I can't even remember finding. Somebody oughta do a feature comparison list.

A reason to use IE?

Seriously - it has a COM/OLE interface. That means I can script it with Perl.

I kid you not, I never expected to have any reason at all to run IE. And now I do? What's next - Outlook?

How to use git in a larger context

Again: not strictly germane, but as this is my programming blog along with being the Semantic Programming blog, here is a git workflow for larger projects. I can't quite grok it, but that's because I'm a total git noob.

Simple Android mockup

Must ... do ... this.

Text-to-Speech

This ... isn't really one of the usual subjects here, but:

• eSpeak text-to-speech
• eSpeak translated to Javascript via magic, apparently
• Inevitable HNN reaction

A/B testing vs. bandit algorithms

I'm starting to think some kind of A/B testing should be included in WWW::Publisher - probably as some kind of more generic mechanism, of course - but along comes a new strategy, the "bandit algorithm", which is more optimal, apparently. [article] [hnn]

Shell under Wx

I really want a Perl REPL inside Decl, but in a Wx or other GUI environment, I want to be able to put it into a separate window. Until now, somehow I've managed never to be able to figure out how it's done. But there is a CPAN shell in such a Wx app. What I really want, then, is to do that, but for a generic shell. (There is also such a thing for Tk, by the way.)

In the larger scheme of things, it would be nice to be able to define the "operating environment" in some way, and pop up semantically specified things like "a shell" in a way that's appropriate to that environment. In a remote context, it could even be some kind of AJAX thing. (I know it's no longer de rigeur to call it AJAX, but hey, I'm old.)

While researching it this time, I also ran across the kitchen-sink REPL Devel::REPL, based on Moose and importing lots of stuff, and PPI, which is a Perl kind-of parser that looks pretty darned interesting.

iOS to Android: a comparison

Good overview of Android, actually.

Federal Register API

The Federal Register has an API.