I first planned to release this text as an appendix entry for Learn You Some Erlang, but considering this feels more like editorial content and not exactly something for a reference text, I decided it would fit better as a blog post.Many newcomers to Erlang manage to understand the syntax and program around it without ever getting used to it. I've read and heard many complaints regarding the syntax and the 'ant turd tokens' (a subjectively funny way to refer to ,, ; and .), how annoying it is, etc.As mentioned at some point in the book, Erlang draws its syntax from Prolog. While this gives a r...

After having started to build my own internet search engine as described in a previous blog post, I now have read some papers and books about web search engine architecture and information retrieval to complete my hobby project. Here is a list of papers and books that I highly recommend to anybody who is interested in this topic:1. Google: data structures and algorithms by Petteri Huuhka2. The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine by the Google founders Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page3. Introduction to Information Retrieval by Christopher D. M...

There’s never been a better time to be a developer, says The Kernel’s technical editor. But in exchange for all the resources laid out in front of you, what are you doing to give back? There’s never been a better time to be a developer. Thanks to an unprecedented range of open-source software, learning resources and useful web services at our disposal, we can learn new languages, get help, collaborate with others and, if our ideas win traction, there’s now a multitude of investors waiting in the wings to help us build companies around our pro...

When I was a teenager I played high caliber baseball. I’m competitive to a fault and when I decide I want to be good at something, results usually follow. Now I’m a third year undergrad studying computer science. There’s something critically different between programming and sports though: A pitching coach teaches you how to pitch, but a CS professor doesn’t teach you how to code.I was surprised that neither my TAs nor professors critiqued my code during my first year, but grew concerned after my second year. The assignments were larger and the problems tougher, but...

PHP 5.4.0 will arrive soon. The PHP team is working to bring to some very nice presents to PHP developers. In the previous release of 5.3.0 they had added a few language changes. This version is no different. Some of the other changes include the ability to use DTrace for watching PHP apps in BSD variants (there is a loadable kernel module for Linux folks). This release features many speed and security improvements along with some phasing out of older language features (Y2K compliance is no longer optional). The mysql extensions for ext/mysql, mysqli, and pdo now use the MySql n...

There is a class of messages which are generated on demandrather than explicitly posted into a message queue.If you call Get­Message or Peek­Messageand the queue is empty,then the window manager will look to see if one of thesegenerated-on-demand messages is due,messages likeWM_TIMER,WM_MOUSE­MOVE,and WM_PAINT.Neil wonders,"In that program that called Invalidate­Rect 100,000 times,how many paint messages were generated?"The Zen answer to this question is "Yes."A more practical answer is "As many as you can get."When somebody calls Invalidate­Rect,the window manager adds the spec...

He tried to understand that one concept for a couple of months before it made sense to him. Admittedly, partial functions are not intuitive for anyone who has been schooled in traditional programming, but still, looking at the problem he was trying to solve it seemed like James was required to expend too much effort relative to the simplicity of the problem (as he pointed out, now that he understands the concept it seems straightforward).He showed me the code, and it was basically a situation where there was common code in the existing function, and the partial function completion allowed the ...

Today, APIs play a bigger role in software development than ever before. The evolution of computing has been dominated by ever-increasing levels of abstraction; the use of higher-level languages, of course, but also the development of platforms, libraries, and frameworks. Professor Douglass C. Smith claims the progression of this second category far outpaced the development of programming languages.  Developers are also noticing that difficulty has shifted from designing algorithms and data structures to choosing, learning, and using an ever-growing set of APIs. Yet, many developers may b...