The O’Reilly Network has put online a few interesting development articles with subjects of Java & Lisp, Python on OSX and managed C++ on .NET.“Lisp and Java“
Why learn a new programming language? Among other excellent reasons (such as good, old-fashioned intellectual curiosity), there’s the opportunity to pick up useful techniques, tricks, and idioms that you can apply in your day-to-day programming life. At its best, studying a new language can give you the kind of conceptual shift that illuminates thorny problems in a new light. Even if your mainstream language of choice doesn’t provide the special-purpose syntax that you find in a language you’re exploring, you can often find a way to implement the underlying technique in a useful manner.
“Writing Managed Wrappers with Managed C++“
Welcome back! It has been a very long time since the last article in this three-part series. The second article focused on the ability to mix managed and unmanaged code in the same module, which is an ability that is unique to Managed C++; no other CLR language possesses this capability. In this installment, I will take this one step further. I will show you how to take existing legacy unmanaged C++ code, and make it usable from any CLR language in the managed world. This is accomplished via managed wrappers, which act as a managed proxy for the unmanaged C++, thus allowing that existing code to be used from C#, VB.NET, or any other .NET language. I don’t have to tell you how valuable this ability is to businesses that have lots of existing C++ code that they wish to use from C# or VB.NET.
“Panther, Python, and CoreGraphics“
Mac OS X Panther includes many updated developer tools. Among them is an enhanced version of Python 2.3 with its own SWIG-based bindings to the CoreGraphics library. Creating PDFs, JPEGs, and documents in other graphical formats just became a lot easier. This article summarizes the capabilities in the Python CoreGraphics module and shows how to use CoreGraphics to rescale and decorate images for publication to the Web.
The article itself was a nifty application of a very common programming idiom to Java. Here’s hoping that Java 1.6 will follow suit with C# 2.0 and include real lambdas, so the idiom becomes even cleaner to use.
I found the link at the end of the article extremely helpful. I’d been meaning to read that paper, but had completely forgotten about it. Its a great paper for those who like their computer history.
Someone had to say it
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If you don’t believe me, read some of the articles of Paul Graham (author of “On Lisp” and “ANSI Common Lisp”): http://www.paulgraham.com/lisp.html . Especially http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html is very good. Even though you might never use Lisp on a daily base for your work/job, you benefit if you know how Lisp or any other functional language work.
It’s a pitty that Lisp-like languages are only considered as educational languages. They offer so much and are very powerfull. Just think about Emacs or Maxima ( http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html ).
Speaking of O’Reilly and Paul Graham: O’Reilly is apparently publishing Graham’s next book ‘Hackers and Painters’. The guy is a very good writer (his ‘ANSI CL’ is the ‘Accelerated C++’ of the Lisp world) so I’m looking forward to it.
I already ordered my copy of “Hackers and Painters”. If it’s only half as good as “ANSI CL” I’m pleased.
I’m still hoping that some publisher will reprint “On Lisp” ( http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html ) which is available for free download, but I’d prefer to have it as a book.
sorry, I just have to run away and can’t read this:
it is just the same stuff shown here ?
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?BlocksInJava