A Selection of Esoteric Programing Languages: “

Write code that nobody is able to understand, but still does compute – that could be one of the ways to understand ‘Esoteric Programming Languages‘. It is a term for languages that are not designed to be good at something or at least to be convenient. No, the reason for doing writing cryptical code like that is the very own sake of style of just being a little exquisite, extreme or to theoretically think about programming. Many are also meant as jokes. If you visit the wiki of esolangs.org you will find hundreds of total strange languages. Every madcap will find its own ways of enlightenment there. Probably the most famous of the esoteric programming languages is Brainfuck. I just compiled some languages that are extraordinary interesting or beauty in my eyes.

Continue reading ‘A Selection of Esoteric Programing Languages’

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(Via Digital Tools.)

About | Lily: “About | Lily

This may be the future.

Lily is powerful, and well-documented visual programming system in a firefox plugin.

Among other things, it includes a web server, processing-compatible SVG graphics.

And lots lots more.

Lily Tutorial 1 from Bill Orcutt on Vimeo.”

(Via Jon Schull’s Weblog.)

WeAreBuild: website design, code & development

A few months ago, we developed a new website for Build design studio. We worked with Tommi and Marc from Digital Club who art directed and designed the website and with Nicky and Michael from Build who provided feedback and advises all along.

Pierre just wrote a nice post about the work we did for the website design, code & development for WeAreBuild.com on the Electronest Potentially Blog – worth a click!

ShareThis

(Via assembling.)

Sex, math, and scientific achievement

By Nat Torkington

Scientific American have an interesting article about gender balance, bias, and abilities. The danger in talking about whether ability is sex-linked is that people want to simplify the science and your position down to “girls’ brains can’t do this stuff” but reality is more complex and inoffensive than this. (update: changed some of what I said about the distribution to reflect the comments)

I’m taking two things away from the Scientific American article: (1) on average, abilities have different distributions across the two sexes; and (2) although these tendencies are probably influenced by hormones, targeted training can lift skills. The distributions are the important bits here: mathematical ability in girls tends to be quite tightly clustered, whereas boys tend to divide into either are more extreme, including the very good and the very poor. The bimodal (correction: broader) distribution of boy math talent puts the lie to “boys are better at math”, a misconception that came from the way we select the best at math. The very good boys have, on average, better skills than the tightly-clustered girls, so when we select “the best at math”, we get mostly boys even though there are huge numbers of girls not very far below them and a huge reservoir of more unskilled boys (correction: than girls) at the bottom end of the distribution.

And we do select “the best at math”—the article talks about kids choosing disciplines based on what they’re best at. In general, boys and girls look at their abilities and if they’re better at numbers go into sciences and if they’re better at words go into arts. So there are girls going into the arts that have better math skills than the boys going into sciences (the girls just happened to have even better verbal skills). This will always be true in individual cases, but the studies show this is an overall tendency rather than anecdotal evidence from specific cases.

What does this mean? I think it shows we need to do a better job of emphasizing that science and technology can be verbal as well as numerical: Larry Wall, the creator of Perl, is a linguist by training, and there’s a similar elegance in great code as in great poetry. If we finally acknowledged that science and technology are fields where words are critical and a keen mind for meaning can go far, rather than pretending it’s all math with syntactic sugar, we might get better computer programmers not to mention a better gender balance. And finally, first year classes should have catch-up skills-building options for those boys and girls who weren’t at the top of the curve. Do readers know of computer science departments (or senior high schools) that test for specific aptitudes and offer remedial courses for those lacking? Drop me a note in the comments if you do.

(Via O’Reilly Radar.)

Message from the Web

By Nat Torkington

If you haven’t read Tim Bray’s “Message from the Web”, take a few minutes to do so now. He spoke at a conference working on an XML schema for accountants, and must have shaken things up with his brief but eloquent description of the web’s sensibilities. It’s already being cited by the likes of Sam Ruby, deservedly so. I need it on a playing card to hand out to the many people I meet who haven’t absorbed the way things work now.

Getting started should be free. · Also, it shouldn’t take more than a few days.

How much did it cost you to start using Google or Flickr or Facebook or YouTube? The answer is always the same. If you want people to adopt anything in any scale, you have to remove barriers, and money is one.

Let’s imagine a scenario: There’s a smart young-ish person who has a basic understanding of business realities and accounting fiction oops methodology. Let’s call her “Emma”. Emma decides that people are underestimating the importance of collecting receivables in Value-Investment portfolios, and figures out a better way to compute a number that reflects that. She lives in Manitoba and doesn’t work for Goldman Sachs, but she can write CGI scripts. She has the idea on Wednesday and gets the script working next Monday, and one quarter later, either gives up on the idea or is incredibly rich. Both are good outcomes.

[Link]

(Via O’Reilly Radar.)

Building Bridges: “The differences is that while it is intuitive that designing a skyscraper is hard, since most people have extensive experience manipulating objects in the real world, designing software is the exact opposite: constructs are taken out of what appears to be thin air and have little relation to physical objects. Since most people have no intuitive feel for how hard it is they assume it must be easy: after all, even 14-year-old kids can do it.”

[tags]software, development, webdev, coding[/tags]

(Via Medallia Blog.)

Taking a break…: “

The magnetosphere project was getting away from me. It happens. It was option overload. So many things I wanted to do with it. My fuses got blown. So I decided to get back to my roots.

One of my first interests when I started working with Processing was the simple beauty of Perlin noise. I am not going to get into the explanation of Perlin noise for two simple reasons.

1) Its after midnight and I should start thinking about getting to bed.
2) I dont really understand it enough to explain it.

What I can say is that noise() in Processing will give you a smoothly changing set of numbers from 0.0 to 1.0 based on Perlin’s noise algorithm. Combined with the new-found wonderfulness of Shiffman’s Vector Library for Processing, I decided to take another stab at making a 3D flowfield based on Perlin noise.

I had attempted it a couple years back and had some decent results, but the z-axis part of it never quite made it over to the left side of my brain so I shelved it for a later attempt. That attempt happened tonight.

Okay, lets see if I can explain what is going on so when you view the video linked at the end of this post, you will get what I was going for.

First, I took short movie, in this case, a movie of me waving a cellphone in front of my iSight. It was short… 33 frames. I brought these frames into Processing and put them into a PImage array. These images were then rendered out in space from back to front so I ended up with a cube of images. The point wasnt to show these images, but I put them there for effect and for testing. The actual goal was to do three dimensional flow-field painting with several thousand particles.

Okay, so I made a 3D flow-field. With any luck and a little free time, I will get into the details of it at some point this week. This flow-field basically allows me to drop objects into the space and they will move based on the 3D vector which is closest to it. Think of a 3D space filled with arrows. The arrows tell objects near them which way to travel. The orientation of these arrows is based on Perlin noise. Throw 10,000 objects into this arrow field and you end up with a nice faux-flocking behaviour.

The images come into play when I color the objects moving through this space. Each object compares its position in the 3D space with the images in the 3D space and grabs the color from the pixel it is closest to.

I did a quick render of the thousands of objects moving through this space. It turned out fairly well. The next step is to use a webcam history instead of using a precanned video. I dont think the images will be all that recognizable, but the colors will cycle nicely.

Click here to view the quicktime.

“

[tags]coding, processing, java, 3d, generated[/tags]

(Via all manner of distractions.)

web 2 dna

an online visualization of a user-chosen website through a graphical DNA-like data mapping approach. the brightness of the lines is determined by the importance of the tags in terms of structure, so that a semantically rich site will appear brighter than one with messy old-style code. a site that focuses on (text) content is one where the DNA patterns are large (filling many containers), but contains a lot of empty spaces between the lines (empty space is the individual words).
see also websites as graphs & dna personality test & dna 11 & protein profiler & dna space.
[baekdal.com]

(Via information aesthetics.)

[tags]data, information flow, statistics, representation, coding, language[/tags]

Notes for a Liberated Computer Language
version 2, July 2006

… is very good text, a mix of code poetry, political philosophy, a revolution manual, a technological thriller, specs… can’t wait to see an interpreter!

(Via pierre.reblog.)

[tags]coding, language, politics[/tags]

Have you tried caching with php to remove php and database overhead? Here is some info on how to begin doing it write, taking into account file access concurrency and other issues. I have not seen a lot of info on this very important part of a busy website.

[tags]bandwidth, code, coding, php, sql, web 2.0[/tags]

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