Recent blog entries for welisc

Exhibit might be exactly what I need.

Thinking about creating a simple application for displaying my family genealogy database. Is it possible to create one that runs entirely in the browser?

Two interesting projects:

TaffyDB is a Javascript database that's designed to be run in a browser.

Mjt is an in-browser web framework.

Why Reddit was rewritten in Python explains why the Reddit engine, originally developed in Lisp, was rewritten in Python. Basically, it comes down to a lack of libraries in Lisp that are readily available in Python.

Why Ruby is an acceptable LISP

Data Munging for Non-Programming Biologists describes The Scriptome.

The horror, the horror.

Tim Bray on Ruby (via Lambda The Ultimate) contains a reference to

... COBOL's ALTER, deprecated 40 years ago and now often cited as the worst feature ever to appear in a major programming language.

How bad could this ALTER statement be?

Very bad indeed.

Style is Substance.

Ken Arnold's Style is Substance argues that programming languages should enforce programming style.

SuMO is a new server for finding ligand-binding sites in proteins. It's the first example I've seen of a bioinformatics application written in OCaml.

Been trying out Jeff Schrager's tutorial Intelligent Computational Biology in BioLisp.

Avoiding thesis work by writing an Eiffel version of Goldberg's Simple Genetic Algorithm. Appears to work but performance is disappointing: about half the speed of the C version. Turning off GC makes little difference.

OCaml and scsh

chalst suggests scsh as an alternative to OCaml. My main interest in OCaml is as a language that I can write can code in as quickly as in a scripting language and compile to get high performance if necessary. (My real interest is in modelling protein structures which needs every drop of performance I can get). That said, I like the design philosophy behind scsh and the idea of embedding domain-specific little languages.

The only real reasons I prefer OCaml over Scheme is that it's statically typed and it has a reputation for being very fast. I'm not sure these are good reasons. Scheme programmers seem to manage just fine without static typing and Brad Lucier showed that, using Gambit-C, you could get performance equivalent to C from Scheme code for number-crunching PDEs.

I think I'm a Scheme programmer at heart but for mercenary reasons I've learning to live with C++ and trying to ignore my suspicion that using Scheme would help me to "beat the averages".

Invested in a copy of The C++ Programming Language last weekend.

My other language is OCaml.