see things differently

Posts tagged with programming

Oh, much less. The total memory was four kilobytes. And he did an amazing lot with that. Especially a biologist who was there at the time, called Nils Barricelli, did simulated evolution amazingly well with a memory of four kilobytes. He developed models of evolving creatures forming an ecology, and they showed punctuated equilibrium, exactly the way real species do. It was astonishing how much he could get out of that machine.

Freeman Dyson, via University of David

What does it mean to program in a functional style? (por Brian Will)

functions can be passed—as arguments—to other functions
if, try, while return something
adhere to statelessness (no side effects, so you can see everything that a function does just looking in the one place)

Minute 10 — The point of this talk is how much “boilerplate” or standard lengthy expressions are necessary in Java to do, what’s essentially nothing: define a class whose members consist of three strings.

(Source: cufp.org)

Vim buffers by Drew Neil

High-dimensional Arrays in J

J is hott. Some highlights from the Wikipedia article and J’s homepage:

you can do a lot with just a few characters in J. Define a moving average in 8 characters, including spaces, for example.
Have you ever felt like whether it’s Java or C, Python or Ruby, all these languages are just the Same Old Thing?

J makes thinking in high-dimensional arrays easy.

The sentence .i 7 8 means “Show me a 7×8 two-array” (ok, “matrix” but … matrices are verbs and arrays are nouns)
The sentence .i 7 8 3 means “Show me a 7×8×3 three-array”.
The sentence .i 7 8 3 4 13 2 66 means "Show me a 7×8×3×4×13×2×66 dimensional seven-array”.

I won’t reprint the long outputs but here’s a shorter one.

And another for clarity:

   i.3 5 4
 0  1  2  3
 4  5  6  7
 8  9 10 11
12 13 14 15
16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23
24 25 26 27
28 29 30 31
32 33 34 35
36 37 38 39

40 41 42 43
44 45 46 47
48 49 50 51
52 53 54 55
56 57 58 59

This is reminiscent of using R’s combn function to visualise higher-dimensional stuff, right?

I guess this is how computers think all the time! I wonder what they say about us when we’re not around.

nice ggplot intro tutorial. Just run the commands, about 6 pages = flexible 1-3 hours of learning, depending how much reading you want to pair it with

by Ramon Saccilotto