language parallax

During the six years of working before grad school, my primary programming language was perl. I had only written a couple of short scripts as an undergrad, but I wound up in a sw position within an operations group, and there was no avoiding perl.
Not that I would have wanted to. After getting […]

I wanted to expound more on points made in the previous post.
Representing source code as an object structure is manna from heaven. Thinking of source code as text leads to all manner of weird and unnecessary consequences.
But beyond just being “object structures”, an important aspect of what I’m seeing in the new wave of […]

A couple of days ago I posted an entry about some of my opinions of the Charles Simonyi interview from a couple months ago. I was surprised at how much traffic that story got. (Maybe because I’m finally starting to tag this stuff with “Software Engineering”?)
Steven Kelly, the CTO of MetaCase (among other […]

Several months ago I ran across the video of a keynote talk given by Martin Fowler at RailsConf ‘06.
I’m not a user of Rails, or of Ruby for that matter. But I’ve been keeping an eye on it for a while. All the fancy Domain Workbench stuff isn’t going to be ready for […]

A few weeks ago I noticed a new blog entry about the MIT Technology Review cover story, Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Meta
I thought I might pick out a few choice quotes and a few comments of my own:

He even has a name for his favorite gambit: he calls it “going meta.”

The idea […]

Last year a friend of a friend brought up the phrase “Ocular Centrism” after some semi-serious banter about the prevalence of visual metaphors in our language. Turns out I wasn’t the first person to notice this. A surfing session several months ago revealed how deeply that idea tied together a lot of my […]

One demo that I did get a chance to see at OOPSLA was Microsoft’s LINQ project.
It focuses on integrating SQL and C#. I’m not certain of the whole scope of the project, but the aspects that come across in the demo are the mixed-syntax editors which allow queries to be directly embedded in C# […]

I just noticed that IBM now has a few pages up about the SAFARI project
One of those pages links to the sourceforge site for lpg (the LALR Parser Generator). Looks like that will be a good place to start in order to get my foot in the door of the safari project.
Another page caught […]

I’ve just registered linguisticparallax.com and languageparallax.com. I’ll use the first as the brand for this blog and for any java packages that I publish.
In doing so, I’m finally embracing the photography (and astronomy) metaphor that I’ve been thinking of for a while. The word parallax refers to the change in the relative position […]

I had thought to stop by EclipseCon ‘07 last week in Santa Clara on Wednesday, but the single-day fee was a little steep considering I was really only interested in attending one 50-minute talk that I had seen a portion of at OOPSLA. That talk was the demo of IBM’s SAFARI “meta-tooling platform”.
A few […]