Older blog entries for lukeg (starting at number 3)

2 Apr 2002 (updated 2 Apr 2002 at 15:02 UTC) »
Easter Hacking
    I've just spent the swedish 4.5-day Easter weekend on some of the most frenzied hacking I've done in years, resulting in my new favourite home-made program: Distel. It's a partial and interoperable implementation of the Erlang programming language in Emacs Lisp. And I even have time left to brag about it on the internet before the sun rises!
Programs and Documentation
    I spent about a day writing a manual for Distel, which makes it the second program that I've been so excited about that I've written a "real" manual for it. The other was Echidna. I usually avoid writing, but it is interesting to go through a lot of iterations of the edit-print-read cycle, catching problems and making little improvements each time. The really interesting thing is how unsatisfactory it would turn out without all those iterations.

    Which raises the awkward thought: I don't print/read/edit my programs that way. As an experiment I've been going through the loop a few times with some of my source code, and I think it makes a really solid improvement. I guess this is old news to good programmers, but I'm not usually in the habbit of sitting down and reading my own programs start-to-end.

    If I were a real man I'd ask some colleagues to point out my worst code, and print/read/edit that. But I'm not sure I'm that brave right now :-)

    All that said, the manual is probably full of typos, and the programs full of bugs - but such is life!

Today I added some basic builtin help functions to Ermacs. As well the as Emacsey C-h k <key sequence> `describe-key', I have a C-h s <key sequence> `find-source', which takes takes you to the source code that's bound to that key. So if you press a key and it doesn't do what you want, you're only about 1sec away from the source code. I think this is a good feature for an under-development editor :-)

Emacs still has the upper hand though, since it takes a bit more than a keystroke to load new definitions into Ermacs, for now..

Welcome back to the "real world", purcell :-)

I joined in with Language of the Year, where a bunch of people get together with the goal of learning a new programming language (Haskell) during the year. So, today I wrote my first Haskell program. Now I'm hoping someone can show me some nice ways to improve it with fancy Haskell features.

6 Dec 2001 (updated 6 Dec 2001 at 17:15 UTC) »

Decided to make an Advogato account of my very own, after perving in other ones for ages.

I'm presently trying to learn how to hack Linux's TCP stack, which is quite fun, sort of.

Hello mbp, purcell, demoncrat, joearm, mikl, everyone!

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