Steve Cooper's Personal Blog

Only one of which is a computer programming language.

At work, we’re designing a new product. It’s a process that involves non-technical users, IT managers, programming colleagues, me, and the computer. It involves a lot of talking, a lot of language. At one end, it’s making sure the users are happy with the system’s capabilities. While talking to them, we use non-technical language, diagrams, and demonstrations. Way at the other, it’s actually typing code.

This makes me think it might be useful to split the languages we’re talking into four;

**User Langage:** Non-technical, example-laden, visual, and concrete. This is where you get into general discussions, produce photoshop mockups of the system, draw rough-and-ready whiteboard pictures, write XP user stories, write user manuals.

**Manager Language:** Your manager needs to know the technical and algorithmic overview, but he doesn’t need to see every class that’s going into the design. This language is the language of high-level functional specs, some UML diagrams, conceptual diagrams.

**Colleage Language:** At this level, you’re going to have to assure yourself that the code you write and the code your colleagues write start meshing together. Precision starts being important, and a real burden. Probably where most of the real thinking goes on. I think one of the reasons Pair Programming works is because it forces you to get into a lot more of these types of discussion, which reduces the possibility that the team’s work won’t gel together.

**Self Language:** This is the idiosyncratic, outboard-brain style of writing that you get into to make sure you understand what you need to be doing. This can be personal pseudocode, notes-to-self, todo lists, or code comments.

**Computer Language:** The code itself.

I think a great deal of the actual design and thinking involved in creating new products goes on above the level of the computer language. When people discuss, say, “Python Vs Java” or “Ruby vs Lisp”, it’s valuable enough, but the choice of language probably isn’t that important in determining the success of the project. I think these language strata go some way to explaining why. Most of the communication goes on between people.

German advert for milk, with the tagline “Hard types need hard bones… drink milk!”

[link](http://coilhouse.net/2008/03/19/du-du-hast-du-hast-milch/)

A friend of mine, Rob Ahrens, asked me how my learning of the
programming language Lisp was going. I thought I’d respond in an open
letter.

Um, Hi, Rob.

I have two previous posts on lisp, [A programming language only a mother could love][blog1], and [lisp, the beautiful hydra][blog2].

[blog1]: http:2007/04/02/a-programming-language-only-a-mother-could-love/
[blog2]: http:2008/01/21/lisp-the-beautiful-hydra/

Childhood Nightmares
——————–

When I’ve had time, I’ve been attempting the problems in [Project
Euler][pe]. Euler lays out a series of ~200 mathsy programming
puzzles, things like ‘find the sum of all the even-valued terms in the
Fibonacci sequence which do not exceed one million.’ I’m using them as
a way of trying out the language. At my side, possibly the only decent
beginner’s book, [Practical Common Lisp][pcl]. (It’s also free.)

So far, I’ve finished 2 problems. Hmm. I’m pretty sure I could have
finished more of them, more quickly, in almost any other language.

That, I think, is at least in part that lisp doesn’t come naturally if
you’re used to non-lisp languages, things that bear a resemblance to C
or BASIC. I’m having to go right back to basics, learning to construct
things in a new way. Here’s the code I used to solve problem 2;

(defun fibseq (max)
(let ((result ())
(n-1 1)
(n-2 0)
(term 0)
(i 0))
(loop
(setf term (cond ((= i 0) 1)
((= i 1) 1)
(T (+ n-1 n-2))))
(setf n-2 n-1)
(setf n-1 term)
(setf i (1+ i))
(when (> term max) (return))
(push term result))
(print result)
result))

(defparameter allfib (fibseq 1000000))
(defparameter evenfib (remove-if-not #’evenp allfib))

; the answer!
(print (reduce #’+ evenfib))

I don’t print this here to demonstrate the clarity of lisp. In fact,
the opposite. This looks like hell to me, at least right now. There
is, no doubt, a *far* better way to do this. But I don’t know, and so
I’m writing programs that are terribly inelegant. Nestled in the code
above is a non-terminating loop with a break condition, because I
couldn’t figure out how to do the equivalent of

while (n < 1000000)
{

Right now I feel like I did when I was ten, programming in BBC basic
and using GOTOs. Hell, it knocks together working programs, right? But
you don't want to stay there too long. That feeling of childhood
programming, though… there's something compelling in it. Lisp tastes
of nostalgia. Remember programming Logo? Or BASIC? Lisp is making me
feel like that. At least for now.

Pretty soon, I hope to have mastered basic loops. Then I'll be well on
my way.

(setq *subject* (list '( ')))
—————————–

Or, now I will talk about parentheses.

In my head, despite being entirely uncomfortable with `while` loops,
I'm starting to see everything falling into a lisp syntax. The idea of
just bracketing up your stuff into lists seems like a great
first-draft syntax for *everything* — want to talk about data
structures? write

(data
(entity1 (attribute1 attribute2))
(entity2 (attribute3 attriubte4)))

want to write pseudocode for a function call?

(func (param1 param2) …)

want to write a todo list?

(do
(buy bread)
(tidy (kitchen living-room bathroom))
(get life))

Valentines day coming up?

(get-count
(make-list #'(lambda (i thee)
(permute #'love i thee))))

Ok. Maybe not. (apologies to Elizabeth Browning there.)

But you get my point. I hope. Those brackets are just fine for
*everything*. I'm starting to understand why hardcore lispers want to
do everything in lisp. My brain is infected with brackets.

But for right now? I'm going to learn to do a `for` loop, and then
we'll see.

[pe]: http://projecteuler.net/
[pcl]: http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/

Fun oddness; [Samurai Dog Armour](http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/PinkTentacle/~3/233241950/)

>This suit of dog armor — identified by antique Japanese armor dealer Toraba.Com as the only known and certified authentic example of its kind — is believed to have been created for the pet of a wealthy, high-ranking and presumably eccentric samurai or daimyo (feudal lord) in the mid to late Edo period (mid-18th to mid-19th century)

[link](http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/PinkTentacle/~3/233241950/)

I’ve just discovered [‘It’s all text!’][iat], a firefox add-on
that makes it easier to edit text on the web.

It’s a pretty simple idea; any textareas (those boxes used for
composing email, writing forum posts, editing wikis, etc) get a little
button;

click the button and it’ll let you edit the same text in a
[proper text editor][st]. When you save the file or close the editor,
it copies all the text back into the web page.

[st]: http://www.sublimetext.com
[iat]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4125

All of this means it’s a lot easier to edit text on the web;
especially useful for emails and, well, blog posts. 😉

I’ve just bought a copy of [sublime text][st], a very pretty text editor for Windows. I’m a bit of text editor geek, but I think it’s justified, with the amount of time I spend typing. Between coding and writing fiction, I spend hours and hours a day typing, so a good text editor is as important as a comfy chair, a good monitor, or a cup of tea. It’s just not civilised without.

If you spend much time writing text, you may want to have a look. I’m using mine for both programming code, and for fiction.

These things make it well worth it, in my opinion;

1. **It’s gorgeous.** _Text Editing shouldn’t feel this good_, says the website, and it’s absolutely right. The colour schemes are lovely, especially _Chocolate Box_, which is shown on the screenshot. If simple text editors like [Notepad][] feel like using a bic biro, and [emacs][] and [vi][] feel like using a technical pencil, [sublime text][st] feels like using a fountain pen.

2. **It’s functional.** As a programmer, you expect the ability to do serious things to your text. Sublime comes bundled with syntax highlighting for many languages, a python plugin system, a build system, it’s own macro language, [regex][] searching, snippets, sorting… there’s lots here. The ability to write python programs means that it’s going to be possible to write, well, absolutely anything you need. And you don’t have to do it in [emacs lisp][elisp]

3. **The support is amazing.** It’s written by Jon Skinner, an Australian who left his job at [Google][gg] to write the editor. I wrote him an email yesterday suggesting a feature. Twelve hours later, he’s written the code and put it into the next beta. Twelve hours. And the reply email was chock-full of details he didn’t need to include, and an apology about the tardyness of the reply.

4. **Full-screen mode;** It has a full-screen mode that lets you blow the window up to occupy every available pixel, which makes it great for writing without distraction. If you’ve looked at rudimentary full-screen editors like [WriteRoom][wr], you’ll know the idea; replace your cluttered desktop with a single text entry window. Sublime Text does this, but still has the advanced functionality of a heavyweight text editor.

5. **It’s only just begun.** The [current version][download] is 1.01, and already it’s stuffed with goodies.

Anyway. Enough. [Go get it][download].

[download]: http://www.sublimetext.com/download
[elisp]: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/elisp-manual/html_mono/elisp.html
[regex]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression
[wr]: http://hogbaysoftware.com/products/writeroom
[notepad]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notepad
[vi]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi
[emacs]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs
[st]: http://www.sublimetext.com/
[gg]: http://www.google.com/

Update: Here’s a copy of my enhanced Markdown package, which I use to write prose: [Download link](http://www.stevecooper.org/documents/Markdown-Enhanced.zip) — unzip it to your Packages folder. In the file `Markdown – Enhanced.sublime-options`, the first line describes the extensions which will open and use this format. Change it to change the file types (.txt, .fiction, etc) which will use this package.