classical geek

For the Prototype & Scriptaculous book, I wrote an interactive interpreter or ’scratchpad’, to allow easy visualisation of non-visual language features. This came in useful especially in the Prototype sections (chapters 8-10), in which objects, functions & closures, and arrays get a good workout.
It occurred to me a little while ago that I could […]

When your favourite programming toolset is announced dead twice in a week, you know it must be in good shape!
First up, Microsoft announced Silverlight, a .NET ‘n’ XAML based presentation system that runs across browsers, and even on Macs. And Miguel’s already announced a port for Linux. The second Ajax killer of the week is […]

Within a couple of weeks of almost getting my head around Ruby meta-classes, here’s a link to an interesting presentation on metaprogramming Javascript (in PDF format) by Adam McCrea. I’m not completely convinced that

show(”brutus”).when(”us-state”).is(”Ohio,Michigan”)

really qualifies as a DSL - reminiscent of Prototype’s somewhat cheesy Try.these() - but it’s a pretty mean feat of coding nonetheless.

I spent most of the day at the Ajax track, but snuck off upstairs to join the Ruby crowd for Dave Thomas’ talk on Ruby meta-programming. Partly, it was the draw of a big name, but mostly just for the fun of guddling in low-level language stuff. I’d been playing around with closures in JavaScript […]