Posts
by Matt Revelle
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Databases, dimensions, and change
While working on a pet project, I was forced to make a decision about data storage. Being somewhat conservative and lazy I decided to (mis)use a row-oriented RDBMS for tagged data objects. That is, there is a table in the database where each row represents an object and I use relationships defined in other tables to annotate each object with any number of tags. Yuck. Google’s press release and paper on BigTable was the first time I had noticed column-oriented tables. Ever since I’ve kept tabs on alternative...
March, 23 2008 • 0 Comments • 0 Faves
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Github
http://github.com As reddit to /., github to sourceforge.
March, 6 2008 • 0 Comments • 0 Faves
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Arc burnout
Arc was recently released as an abstraction layer on MzScheme. Much has been said about the design philosophy and the lack of innovation. The most significant blunder in the release of Arc is the absence of a packaging system. People are excited to be a part of the new community and share code that could wind up being in a standard library. There’s a potential chain reaction that will now decay without easy code sharing. Package management is an ugly problem, but there are many preexisting systems from which...
February, 4 2008 • 0 Comments • 0 Faves
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Fringe Languages != FP Languages
In a recent post, a claim is made that functional programming has never been popular and never will be. More on that later, but how does he define functional programming? The author states: He also implies that Python and Perl are FP languages. His definition of FP languages includes all languages that enable the FP paradigm. There are functional programming languages: e.g., Haskell and F#. And there are languages that can support the paradigm of functional programming: e.g. arguably every language. Also...
February, 4 2008 • 0 Comments • 0 Faves
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I think the future of software is in things designed like the Korean alphabet. Deceptively simple with incredibly complex powers that you can’t even begin to explore fully. … It’s not simple vs. complex, it’s how do you merge the two in an elegant way. That’s where software needs to go[.] older rant by Zed Shaw.
January, 1 2008 • 0 Comments • 0 Faves
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It's alive! ...almost
Spent this past week working on my site, dynamictyping,org. I was planning on storing log entries and related data in flat files but kept putting it off. Earlier this week, the not-so-novel idea of using some service to store posts and comments hit me. Tumblr and Disqus are now managing my log content. I wrote a little library, cl-tumblr, to pull data via Tumblr’s web API. It’s still missing some features, but will be hacking on it over the next week. I’ve been tempted to run back to Python and web.py, but...
December, 22 2007 • 0 Comments • 0 Faves
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Write it down, wear it around
http://www.amazon.com/WHITE-BOARD-Alternative-Retro-Buckle/dp/B000XRMQ52 Came across this while searching for white boards.
December, 16 2007 • 0 Comments • 0 Faves
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I explore data, write algorithms, and build systems.
