Monthly Archives: May 2008

Cite. Nothing interesting — just reporting that I text and drive on occasion. And (randomly) that I don’t try to dig my phone out of my pocket if it’s ringing. But I figured I’d mention it. (BTW, this interview was prompted by a Twitter from @jojeda.)

In a conversation lamenting the delay in conversion between academics and practice, @mfeathers on Twitter said: We’ll see. I think dynamic typing is a classic “worse is better” scenario. Won’t win arguments. Will win longevity. To which I replied: Yeah, we’ll see. I’m really hoping not — dynamic languages really do suck for long-term maintenance. [...]

Write a game which randomly generates a number between 0 (inclusive) and 100 (exclusive), and then prompts the user for a number: if the user guessed the number, exit; else, tells them if they should guess higher or lower. And do it in as few characters as possible. (Ruby impls particularly desired.)

Seems like I was a bit hasty in my condemnation of Ruby XML parsing: Hpricot apparently handles namespaces okay through the magical .%() syntax. This tip is shared by Garrick Van Buren based on a Ruby.MN mailing list conversation. I’ll let you know how well it works out for me.

I regularly pick up podcasts that take on wildly different viewpoints, because I regularly find that if you look at people fighting on opposite sides of nominally the same issue, you discover they they’re actually fighting different battles. The best example of this is evolutionary biologists and Creationists, who are arguing about wildly different things [...]