Harold's web home

My Tutorials

• Runtime Integration Testing
• Kawa & Derby
• 8 Queens code, simple code & notes
• QEMU VMs
• Old notes on Apple brand computers
• The concept of fixpoints, in Haskell

Bloggy blogging

You can check out my blog for news and random thoughts.

Dvorak

I prefer to type with the Dvorak keyboard layout. Mmm ... comfort :) Recently, I've been pointed at the new Colemak keyboard layout, which is now on my "to do" list. I've noticed that my right pinky takes on too much work using Dvorak (though better than in Qwerty), so when there is time for retraining...

Korean

I have some info up on the Korean language.

Programming Language Tire-kicking

I've been trying out diffent programming languages, and I think Haskell is the best I've found ("Best" is, at best, very difficult to quantify.). I've put together some information about it. Standard ML and Ocaml seem like the C and C++ (respectively) of the functional language world - Standard ML is spartan, and Ocaml adds many features to the utilitarian ML base with "interesting" new syntax. Comparing Common Lisp to Scheme is interesting, also. Of course, as a working programmer, I'm stuck with C/C++ and a smattering of Java, but I suppose all this playing around is useful because

1. I can take some patterns and use them to write better C/C++ code,
2. For my hobby programming, I can be more productive, and
3. One day, it might come in handy.

I am still having a lot of fun playing around in Common Lisp, mainly because of the meta-language features built-in (macros, etc.). There still seem to be way too many "write a parser and interpreter for my DSL (domain-specific language)" projects out there in Haskell, but hopefully Template Haskell will help fix this. Lisp also enjoys more mature development environments and libraries than Haskell at the moment, and it seems likely to stay that way for a while. Haskell seems to be regarded as academics-only.

Some Interests