Posts tagged languages

October 5, 2011

A few definitions of the word “weblog”

  • “A website that displays in chronological order the postings by one or more individuals and usually has links to comments on specific postings.” From The Free Dictionary
  • “A blog (blend of the term web log) is a type of website or part of a website. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video.” From Wikipedia
  • “A diary is a blog that no one reads.” Heard on the radio last week
Gues which definition I like best?

June 9, 2011

New words in the Oxford Dictionary

Notable additions include man cave, NSFW, ZOMG and permalink.

(via Neatorama)

July 7, 2010

“It is my belief that Apple is definitely working on a new language”

An excellent post on waffle entertaining the idea that Apple is working on a new language to complement Objective-C. Charles Ying from satine.org thinks that a language close to JavaScript would be a good fit, due in part to extensive use of the language in iOS, iAd & iTunes.

It’s a strong theory – and one that I would like to se a reality, given the popularity of C-style syntax and garbage-collected environments. I not a big fan of low-level languages, but crying out for one that is more abstracted than Objective-C is met with a kind of resistance I’ve never really quite understood – a resistance that an Ars Technica article discussing the future of Apple’s languages and APIs explains perfectly:

And so continues one of the biggest constants in software development: the unerring sense among developers that the level of abstraction they’re current working at is exactly the right one for the task at hand. Anything lower-level is seen as barbaric, and anything higher-level is a bloated, slow waste of resources. This remains true even as the overall level of abstraction across the industry marches ever higher.

April 3, 2010

Text file dictionaries

I learned about this just last week: Linux/Unix/OSX operating systems have a built-in English dictionary text file located at /usr/share/dict/words.

December 15, 2009

After the Deadline now supports diaereses

Diaereses aren’t used very often anymore, which is a shame.

November 24, 2009

Thoughts on Go

Ongoing discussion at Stack Overflow regarding the language. Seems to be an equal divide of those who like it, those who don’t and those who couldn’t care less.