[19:18] <Catspaw> Joel Spolsky’s “Joel on Software”; Mike Clark’s “Pragmatic Project Automation”; Marin Fowler’s “Refactoring”; Robert L Glass’ “Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering”; Karl Fogel’s “Producing Open Source Software”; Mike Gunderloy’s “Coder to Developer”; Andrew Hunt and David Thomas’ “The Pragmatic Programmer”; Kernighan and Rob Pike’s “The Practice of programming”; Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher’s “Unlocking the clubhouse”; Steve mc
[19:18] <Catspaw> Connel’s “Code Complete”; Greg Wilson’s “Data Crunching”

Understanding Classes and Objects in REALbasic, by Mark Choate, a regular poster on the RB Nug, and author of REALbasic Cross-Platform Application Development – which I haven’t read yet. This is actually a chapter from the book.

I built a functioning UM in around four hours, plus some debugging and tweaking to help me understand more what the code does. Step by step debugger and all the trimmings. Nifty.

But… I can’t get past the decryption level. I am doomed. Oh well, just saved my week-end I guess!

Haven’t decided yet whether to join this year’s ICFP contest – will have to see the task. And even so – which language? Ah well… Erlang would be cool, even if I am not yet up to speed on it. RB could work – after all this is one language I am most comfortable in. But Functional it is not

Weird, innit? This is from the codex posted yesterday, I think.
There’s a lot of gobbledygook in there, including a Gif89a header. Waiddaminit! This I know from my fPic efforts. RB sure came in handy, to extract the gif file. Never mind the jpeg above, what I did was remove the 0×1a73 first bytes, and save that as a Gif. Since you can stuff anything and everything after a valid gif without breaking it – it will just be ignored, which is, among others, a crude way to perform steganography… – the file displayed alright, but was still 2.2MB heavy… Screenshot, conversion from PDF to JPG – with an RB app, of course! – and here we go.

The theme is supposed to be computational archaeolinguistics. Read at face value – I am alas very good at that – it is right down my field of [supposed] expertise. Reading between the lines, as some #erlang fellows mentioned, it could be that the computational is not the means – doing linguistic research with ‘puters – but rather digging an old computer language, or else:

<marc_vw>	it is probably about data mining
<marc_vw>	maybe looking at computation results
<marc_vw>	and trying to figure out what language the hardware used was
		programmed in
<marc_vw>	my guess is reengineering a dead computer language
<noss>		mine too, evaluating some kind of program specification.

Which makes more sense… Other tidbits include Latin ignoti et quasi occulti ie “unknown and almost hidden”, English, including written from right to left: welldonedaedsi luap “Well done, Paul is dead”, several appearances of the word apply, which could be a computer command, a magical word – abracadabra – and other meaningless stuff.

Four more hours to go.

6. Zero-based arrays

C arrays began at zero to match memory addressing. In a weakly typed scripting language, there’s exactly no reason to do this. There hasn’t been for decades. Can’t we please start the arrays at 1 where God intended?

I dunno what god[s] have to do with numbers and arrays. But while myArray(VIII) would certainly be geeky enough, there’s a reason why the Roman civilisation disappeared – crashed like an 8-bit processor running Flex or CP/M on January 1, 2000, rather – and the Arabs, after millenia of internal and external fights, massacres and general disarray, are still there. They have the zero, and the Romans dinna have it. Of course, arguing – like some did in the comments – that 0-based [which I favour, if you hadn’t noticed yet] are POLS is a bit disingenuous. See the battles that raged in 2000/2001 regarding when the 21st Century started – people expecting the new century to start on ~0, whereas it starts on ~1. Surprises can smack you in the face – or sour a dinner party – at any corner.