2016 Journal

Created: by Pradeep Gowda Updated: Nov 04, 2023

See also: log / 2015 / 2017

January

Monday, 04 January 2016

Saw the book “Fashionable Nonsense” mentioned in NN Taleb’s “Fooled by randomness” during a re-read. My take away from the book is that there is simply too much posturing done by all us of about “knowing about stuff” than actual, deep, functional understanding of the “stuff” we talk about.

Tuesday, 05 January 2016

Programming languages for 2016

On the list: (ON -> on)

  • D, because I started using D at $work last year and I have been very productive. I can myself replacing Python with D for most non-web programming. Web development is still the domain of things like Play framework, Python web frameworks etc., for the time being. Doing web development confidently in D, is something I have to ramp up this year. D brings a nice balance of system programming, compiled binary, good bindings to C and C++, decent IDE support (Xamarin studio) etc.,
  • OCaml has been on my radar for a couple of years, and this is the time to really shake off the imperative/OOPS mindset with this language.
  • Purescript for web front end programming. I think Purescript wins (in my mind) for being “general purpose” compared to games/visualization usecases towards Elm appears to be leaning going by the early adopter inclinations.
  • Erlang for concurrent programming.

Off the list for now: (less off -> more OFF)

  • Nim - while it is highly productive, I’m waiting for an “identity” to develop around the community so that I can use it with confidence for specific projects.
  • Haskell - It is still a pie in the sky. OCaml appears to be a much more easy to grok language plus Haskell feels like heavy, like Java heavy. Not a good mental picture to have for now. It’s not for the lack of trying though.
  • Rust - having done some coding, Rust is pretty nice. I have to find a project where Rust will shine. I don’t have one at the moment. Also, there D fighting for the same mindshare.

Wednesday, 13 January 2016

A bash script to upload files to neocities.org.

Wednesday, 20 January 2016

Just Enough Math

Started watching Just enough Math

Four points:

  • Decomposition
  • Pattern Recognition
  • Pattern generalization and abstraction
  • Algorithm design

Friday, 22 January 2016

Sublime Text 3 + D blog post

September

Friday, 02 September 2016

Programming langauges redux

  • Scala because I shifted projects and scala is the de-facto language. I should also investigate how viable “native scala” is. The problem with Scala is not the langauge (well…), but the neighbourhood (Java programmers. Ick.)
  • OCaml actually got more interesting as a target with the release of 1.0 version of Bucklescript – an OCaml to readable javascript compiler.
  • Erlang is on the backburner because I don’t see the bandwidth being avaialble for it here.
  • D will hopefully become my default langauge over Python for scripting.