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  On Erlang's Syntax

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...

   Erlang,Syntax,Error     2011-12-22 08:35:42

  Code reviews in the 21st Century

There's an old adage that goes something like: 'Do not talk about religion or politics'.  Why?  Because these subjects are full of strong opinions but are thin on objective answers.   One person's certainty is another person's skepticism; someone else's common sense just appears as an a prior bias to those who see matters differently.  Sadly,  conversing these controversial subjects can generate more heat than light.   All too often people can get s...

   Code review,21 Centuary     2012-02-10 06:39:14

  Output control functions in PHP

The Output Control functions in PHP allow you to control when output is sent from the script. This can be useful in several different situations, especially if you need to send headers to the browser after your script has began outputting data. The Output Control functions do not affect headers sent using header() or setcookie(), only functions such as echo and data between blocks of PHP code. These output control functions include ob_start(0, ob_clean(),ob_get_contents(), etc. To be honest, I a...

   PHP,output buffer,relationship,ob     2012-06-15 10:11:58

  A Perl Regular Expression That Matches Prime Numbers

perl -lne '(1x$_) =~ /^1?$|^(11+?)\1+$/ || print "$_ is prime"' Can you figure out how it works? I give an explanation below, but try to figure it out yourself. Here is what happens when you run it: $ perl -lne '(1x$_) =~ /^1?$|^(11+?)\1+$/ || print "$_ is prime"' 1 2 2 is prime 3 3 is prime 4 5 5 is prime 6 7 7 is prime 8 9 10 11 11 is prime Here is how it works. First, the number is converted in its unary representation by (1x$_). For example, the number 5 gets converted into 1x5, which is ...

   Perl,Regex,Regular expression,Prime number,One line     2011-12-26 08:42:00

  Tricks with Direct Memory Access in Java

Java was initially designed as a safe managed environment. Nevertheless, Java HotSpot VM contains a “backdoor” that provides a number of low-level operations to manipulate memory and threads directly. This backdoor – sun.misc.Unsafe â€“ is widely used by JDK itself in packages like java.nio or java.util.concurrent. It is hard to imagine a Java developer that uses this backdoor in any regular development because this API is extremely dangerous...

   Java,Directly memory access,Tricks,JVM     2012-02-13 05:31:19

  C Preprocessor Hell

Lisp programmers should stop reading right now because they'll likely suffer severe injury of the jaw muscles as they laugh themselves silly at how hard it is to do some things in C. The C language has a pre-processor (typically called cpp) that is both infuriating and powerful. How powerful is usually best described as 'just too little' and it has happened more than once that I found myself almost - but not quite - able to do what I wanted to do. The frustration can run very deep at ti...

   C,Preprocessor,Lisp,Hell     2012-01-19 10:22:31

  C/C++ Pointer Declaration Syntax – It makes sense!

I never really liked the way pointers are declared in C/C++: int *a, *b, *c; // a, b and c are pointers to int The reason is that I am used to reading variable declarations as MyType myVar1, myVar2, myVar3; and I always read “int*” as the type “integer pointer”. I therefore wanted the following int* a, b, c; // a is a pointer to int, b and c are ints to mean that a, b and c all were of type int*, i.e. pointers to int. and I therefore found it slightly a...

   C,Pointer,Declaration,Attempt     2012-02-22 05:43:58

  A Hello, World Servlet

Servlets are the pure Java solution to handle web requests. Many application will use servlets instead of JSP and others will use servlets in conjunction with JSP. Experienced JSP programmers use servlets in conjunction with JSP to create clearer and simpler applications. The servlets handle Java processing: form handing, calculation and database queries. JSP formats the results. Servlets belong in WEB-INF/classes. On this machine, the source is in Java source in /var/www/hosts/www.caucho.com/we...

   Web.xml,Tomcat,Servlet,WEB-INF     2011-05-08 10:31:39

  Amazon is a good company but doesn't have the best business model

Public opinion about a company is usually based on its performance. If it performs well, people will praise it, otherwise people will blame it. In 1999, Apple was still a broken apple(Steve Jobs's talent and effort was paid off yet). Public opinion about Apple was the closed model caused Apple's failure. They built hardware themselves, developed software themselves and delivered service themselves, this is certainly not sustainable. But Steve Jobs let everyone see this new model. In order to con...

   Business model,Amazon,Apple, Microsoft     2013-07-02 11:34:45

  XML Abuse

It’s everywhere. XML Abuse. From Domain Specific Languages to Data Serialization, XML is the most commonly abused data format I’ve ever encountered. XML is perfectly fine for (because it was designed for this): First of all: XML was designed to be written by humans and read by humans. Nearly all generated XML I’ve seen sucks badly. I think this is because XML cannot efficiently represent common data structures found in programming languages.XML is good...

   XML,Abuse,Alternative,Serialization,Data storage     2011-12-14 07:12:10

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