It’s not just pulling off a complex engineering feat that makes programmers love their jobs. There are small pleasures to be had even in your day to day tasks, if you look for them. Seasoned programmers know the thrill of recognising the possibility to introduce an abstraction over duplication. A task as simple as renaming a variable can be the difference between obscurantism and lucidity. It’s the boy scout principle in action. [Read More]

One of the joys of reading SICP is that apart from the main subject matter, we come across many tangential topics that are interesting in their own right. One such topic is mentioned in Exercise 2.6: Church numerals. Named after the mathematician Alonzo Church, Church numerals are a way of representing natural numbers in lambda calculus. But what is λ-calculus? From a programming perspective, λ-calculus can be thought of as the smallest universal programming language. [Read More]

From a very long time, I have been an admirer of Lisp, an often praised but seldom used programming language. Common consensus about Lisp is that it is the kind of language you don’t need to know to get your daily tasks done, but any programmer worth his salt should be familiar with its concepts. For a beginner, perhaps the easiest way to get a taste of Lisp is to go through The Little Schemer. [Read More]

Yahoo has announced it will shut down its web mashup application Pipes on September of this year. Pipes was a pretty useful application to combine web feeds from multiple sources. With an easy to use GUI, you could add filters, modify the fields present in a feed and render the Pipe in RSS, JSON or Atom formats. So you could subscribe to a Pipe just like you would subscribe to any web feed. [Read More]