Category Archives: programming

IDSC V: Accessing and Modifying Vectors

In the previous post of the Immutable Data-Structure Canon we looked at vectors, their internal structure, how they are created, and how more elements are inserted. In this post we continue where we left off and examine the code used … Continue reading

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IDSC IV: Creating and Growing Vectors

Vectors provide constant time random access to any element referenced by an index. Like their fixed length cousins, arrays, they are usually implemented by storing their elements in consecutive memory locations. Such a strait forward implementation, however, doesn’t allow for … Continue reading

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IDSC III: Lazy Seqs

Lazy evaluation is an important concept in functional programming. Running on the JVM, Clojure does not support general laziness, but it has a data-structure abstraction called lazy sequence that provides for many of the benefits of the more general strategy. … Continue reading

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The Design of Design

Mediocre design provably wastes the world’s resources, corrupts the environment, affects internatonal competitiveness. Design is important; teaching design is important. Fred Brooks, “The Design of Design”. Page x Fredrick Brooks, the author of the “Mythical Man Month ” and the … Continue reading

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IDSC II: Lists

Lists are the simplest data-structures that can easily grow. In this post, as part of the immutable data-structure canon, we’re going to look at how immutable lists are implemented in Clojure. Let us review the definition of list in general. … Continue reading

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The Immutable Data-Structure Canon

In the April issue of Communications of the ACM, George V. Neville-Neil (a.k.a. Kode Vicious) reviews the fundamental data-structures — array, list, tree, and hash table. Because of the importance of data-structures for all programming, he calls it the “data-structure … Continue reading

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How Hard Can It Be to Read a File?

Reading code is good for you. Everyone knows this, but few actually follow the advice. It’s like healthy eating: Nobody would oppose it, but it is often ignored out of inertia. I’m certainly guilty of skipping my healthy dose of … Continue reading

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Engineering and Framework Fever

Great article by Mike Taylor in this month’s PragPub magazine in which he examines the tension between hand-coding all of your application’s code and using libraries and frameworks. Briefly summarized, the problems Taylor has with libraries are: bad quality, documentation … Continue reading

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HTML5 Links

Some links about the upcoming HTML5 standard: Documentation Mark Pilgrim is writing a book on HTML5 and publishing the work in progress online Effects and Demos Blowing up HTML5 video and mapping it into 3D space: Not obviously useful, but … Continue reading

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Identifying Names with OpenNLP and JRuby

When trying to make sense of text, nouns are a good place to start, as they usually convey the subject of the text. To be more precise, when analyzing text to find out, what it’s about, we want to identify … Continue reading

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