Yekrats.com: Scotto’s Seafud Shanty

If you haven’t seen it already, my good pal Fuzzy has an interesting rant. About his elevator at work.

Probably more interesting if you’re a programmer or like computer interface design.

I found the following video about the Inform programming language, and it made me want to get back into programming IF again. The “natural language” thing I could probably do without (and I can imaging things getting needlessly complicated by making the interface “natural”) but the IDE seemed to be brilliant. I wish TADS had debugging tools like the transcript control and Skein!

Inform 7 screencast

I just found this good article, Why Programmers Should Learn Go. I’d actually take it a step further, however, and say that anyone that uses patterns of organization would benefit from learning the game.

A couple-few years ago I played it somewhat often online. Within a few weeks of doing it, I noticed that my mind was sharper at seeing patterns of organization. Certain poorly arranged elements bothered me more, like a bad web page or a messy room.

About a year-and-a-half ago I dabbled in the programming language Rails, working on a web game project that Carl and I discussed. (Rails is a programming language which takes a zen-like approach to programming web applications.) I fizzled out a bit on it, mostly because I couldn’t quite get Rails to do all of the amazing things that I knew it could do. I was pretty frustrated about that!

Well, since then, Rails has advanced from version 1.2 to 2.0, and added a few ease-of-use features. But giving me a leg up over last time, I’m actually setting up a development environment here at home, instead of working on the server. (Well, duh.) So, here are some things that are helping me…

Actually working on my files locally with an IDE, instead of typing everything into the server using vi, is a tremendous help. Thus, I can have a local database, a local webserver, and can tear everything down and build it back up with ease.

Also I found a couple of very helpful screencasts about Rails:

• Learning Rails
• Railscasts