Via Matt, check out Aaron Swartz's series of tutorials on How to Do Stuff, in particular, How to Do Version Control with CVS .
Also, via LtU, check out this tutorial on how to build a compiler (PDF).
Thanks to Adam for pointing out an attempt by some democrats to define any gun as a weapon of mass destruction.
Pay attention to the hypocrisy. Darneille claims that she wants to define guns to be weapons of mass destruction so she can justify stronger penalties to apply to people like the snipers who hit the D.C. area a few months ago. Hello? It's called the death penalty. If not, it's at least life imprisonment. What stronger penalty do you need for multiple murder?
This is clearly a conniving attempt to increase gun control, and do it in the name of anti-terrorism. It's so dishonest. This is yet another example of why I'm more afraid of the left in this country.
Via Adam, some interesting discussion of idiomatic Perl.
Incidentally, which do you prefer?
$depth and $depth += ($datadir =~ tr[/][]) - 1;
or
if depth: depth += datadir.count('/') - 1
Anyway, this thread of articles goes beyond this silly bit of syntax - it's more interesting than that. In any case, I hope Perl 6 will make this look nicer.
BitWorking:
Ok, when I ask for Regex-able XML, and complain that the pathologies of XML are the root cause of the problem, I might sound like a simpering newbie who just doesn't know how to use the available tools. So how about listening to a guy who's been doing XML longer than almost anybody: Tim Bray.
So check out Tim Bray's XML Is Too Hard For Programmers.
The most interesting thing I took from Bray's article is this: Years and years after relational database technology is mature, we still spend a lot of our time writing code to shuffle data to and from tables. Similarly, with the callback model of XML processing he's talking about, we spend a lot of time trying to use XML.
Plus, I keep hearing proposals for XML-based programming languages. That's the silliest thing in the world to me, and Bray agrees:
An XML-Oriented Programing Language? One response has been a suggestion that we need a language whose semantics and native data model are optimized for XML. That premise is silly on the face of it: here are two reasons why:
* Some decades after the advent of the relational database, we have not seen programming languages center themselves around normalized data models; in fact, the movement away from the C struct-centered worldview to O-O code+data encapsulation is really a move away from the tabular paradigm. You can embed SQL in most languages now, but normally you don't implement any serious business logic in it. If this hasn't happened after decades in the relational world, why would we expect it to happen in the XML world?
* The notion that there is an "XML data model" is silly and unsupported by real-world evidence. The definition of XML is syntactic: the "Infoset" is an afterthought and in any case is far indeed from being a data model specification that a programmer could work with. Empirical evidence: I can point to a handful of different popular XML-in-Java APIs each of which has its own data model and each of which works. So why would you think that there's a data model there to build a language around?
Update: Here's a response from XML.com
A great list of success quotes courtesy of RWN.
The LGF Prayer:
Lord, grant me the serenity to ignore the trolls, the courage to debate with honest opponents, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Ah-men.
Monday, March 17, 2003
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Thanks Dave.
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kevin sands: Sep 6, 7:23pm