I've not been spending nearly as much time as I'd like to on #haskell recently, so I almost managed to completely miss the xmonad phenomenon. Luckily for me, dons was good enough to write about it, so I haven't missed out completely.

Last year, I spent a few months running wmii - which was fantastic. Since then I've been playing around with Gnome ( Read more... )

In a previous post, pozorvlak and I wondered about the differences between the thought processes that goes into writing good static code, and those that go into good dynamic code. We figured that there wasn't a lot out there to help dynamic programmers get the hang of static style thinking, so what follows is a simple little toy example, solved in what I ( Read more... )

Lots of folk seem to agree that one of the nice things about having a blog is that you can use it as a public whiteboard, to help order your thoughts on any given subject. I don't post all that often myself, but this isn't because my thoughts are already ordered. It's because I've long been in the habit of using a different technology for ordering ( Read more... )

I'm amazed I haven't been following this for some time. I mean, how could I fail to notice someone building working strength enhancing robot exo-suits? But no - the first I heard about it (about this team - I knew vaguely about some US folk having battery issues) was when I saw the BBC video yesterday ( Read more... )

pozorvlak recently discovered a bit of a gotcha in writing haskell examples:

If I'm in emacs, and I write this:

tick = do n <- get; put (n+1); return n;

on three lines, it comes out like this:

tick = do n <- get
put (n+1)
return n
This is because emacs has a particularly smart indent mode - it notices the "do", and realises that I ( Read more... )

We all know and love Lazy Evaluation[1]. Among other things, it allows us to do cool stuff like optimize away benchmarks. It occurred to me today though, that the problem with laziness in life in general is that sometimes you get hit with 12 deadlines at once and wish you'd previously been a bit more eager. So I wonder if anything yet exists which ( Read more... )

A few posts back, I mentioned that I was going to try switching from vim to emacs again (editor switching being something I do on a regular basis for a variety of reasons), so as to have a go at a new collaborative editing gadget ( Read more... )

I woke up this morning to discover that my name had been mentioned in the #haskell channel while I was asleep - I think of myself as a lurker in there, so this surprised me. Checking my scrollback, it was dons asking the lambdabot when was the last time it had seen me..

13:58 < gds> dons: You "@seen"ed ?
13:58 < dons> gds, ah let me think ( Read more... )

Just a quick note about my last post... This fits somewhere into the great static vs dynamic typing war, and doesn't aim to be comprehensive - it's just one piece of ammo for one side.

Writing this took a lot longer than I expected. At the time, it felt like I was fighting haskell's type system - which is something I've heard a lot of people ( Read more... )

Do you miss being able to type while (<>) { ... } ? If so, just slap the following in your local handyfunctions library:

import System
import IO
import Monad

perlGetContents :: IO String
perlGetContents = do
args <- getArgs
if (args == []) then getContents
else foldr (liftM2 (++)) (return "") $
map ((hGetContents = ( Read more... )