Characters vs. Bytes
Tim Bray has written an introduction to Unicode. From my quick skimming, his writing seems exceptionally clear.
Archive for April 27, 2003
How to Make a Fast Curry
Lambda: “Our conclusion is simple, and contradicts our initial intuition: compiled implementations should use eval/apply.”
Bookmarks
Two links I want to remember are Google Zeitgeist and where to find those tiny badges.
Unix-Haters Handbook
Rooneg notes that the The Unix-Haters Handbook (circa 1994) is now available online, hosted by Microsoft. It has a forward by Donald Norman and an anti-forward by Dennis Ritchie.
That Honda Ad
Here’s some discussion of the Rube Goldberg Honda Ad. I’d just assumed it was CGI…but Eric says it’s not.
Chandler
Here’s a transcript of Kapor and Hertzfeld’s talk at O’Reilly. Chandler is written in Python, which Hertzfeld says is three times faster to program in than Java, which is three times faster than C. Chandler uses wxWindows for its platform-agnostic interface framework. The Mac version uses native widgets, but the program as a whole doesn’t feel at all native to me. I do like the way you can click on an address component (such as a phone number) to edit it. There’s no annoying editing mode, like in Apple’s Address Book. Hertzfeld apparently likes browsers: every view in Chandler has a URL, and one of the “key concepts is that you can have multiple Views onto each data set.” Kapor says: “We’re not successful if we make commercial development impossible.”
