Map & Produce » Language

Impressive List of Languages Ported to .NET Runtime

noel — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 23:32:26 +0000

A couple of thoughts. First, if you are designing stuff for the long term, going with one of these ports (eg a non-.NET-native language) should be considered. You always have the native runtime to fall back on. The reverse is true of C# thanks to Mono. Second, the .NET programming stack may now be officially certified as robust. Haters now dismissed, lesson over.

The Gospel of Judas

noel — Thu, 13 Apr 2006 23:32:27 +0000

I read the gospel of Judas today. I was disappointed. Perhaps my standards for heresy are too high. When I first read about this YAGG (Yet Another Gnostic Gospel, not to be confused with the earlier ‘revolutionary’ gospels of Thomas, Mary, the Savior, Peter, et al), off my imagination lifts, fancying over the Pythagorean influence, the enchanting Egyptian cultic rituals, the deep, Matrix-y suspicions that things aren’t how they seem, etc. All I get is a few little number tricks and some self-generating-emination dude named Saklas. Hell, Borges’ fiction is more pruriently believable than this dross. Why can’t the secret, forbidden knowledge be more exciting???!!!

Additionally, I have also concluded that Scientology is a new Gnosticism, based on similarities between their cosmologies. In reading the gospel of Judas, the full picture of what L. Ron Hubbard was striving to capture all those years quickly appeared.

“I can’t believe it. He was always such a stateful monad…”

noel — Tue, 16 Aug 2005 23:38:56 +0000

The self-dubbed “Swiss Army Knife of Admin Tools” that Microsoft, for reasons which I am very curious about, has code-named Monad, seems quite the little bag of tricks. It’s a command shell, it’s a scripting language, it’s a strongly-typed object-oriented .NET language, it’s interpreted, it’s dynamic, it’s scriptable, it’s a bird, plane, a bit of cheese, and your dessert.

Now, as to the name, all I might wager is this. Objects know their states, and the states of others, better than the text that current command lines must parse in order to pipe and slice. This makes the user the Chief Monad of the system, arranging objects into a pre-existing harmony of computery goodness. Eat it, Voltaire.

Tweedy Bird’s Listener-Response Theorizing

noel — Mon, 25 Apr 2005 23:30:04 +0000

I’m so pleased with that title, I won’t say any more.

More on Walker Percy, Terrorism, and English Languge Data Parsing

noel — Wed, 09 Mar 2005 23:44:26 +0000

In the 1987 novel The Thanatos Syndrome, Walker Percy sketches a couple of scenes that seemed to me quite ludicrous from a software and data angle. In response to the inevitable crisis, the love interest (apparently with l337 h4X0r 5ki11Z) runs to her home in the marsh, boots up her pc, and interfaces with four different government databases to cross-reference and visually display a map that correlates the chemical elements in state water supplies with a map of the state.

Not that the hardware is silly, nor that the data is silly. Both were quite accurately described by the incomparable Mr. Percy. What my mind balked at was to believe that four different government agencies have databases that are so easily mined, and a visualization software that can scale so well (from chemical concentrations in water to maps of the state).

Now, I think, I can finally see where we could get this. Google Maps + XML + Web Services for databases + English language data parsing.

The hard part was never getting the data (though that’s interesting). Nor was it matching one thing with another (that’s pretty cool too). The hard bit is, how do you come up with a thing in the first place just from raw data? There’s no ontology in data, it’s just data.

From the article:

“We have guys who can crack hard drives,” Mr. Alexander said. “Getting the information out is easy. The hard part is sharing it, and organizing it, so that everybody in an agency, even nonexperts, can use it.”

The data has always been there for the terrorists to use, or for companies to, ahem, lose track of (a la ChoicePoint). It’s just that there’s no easy way to pull it together into something useful.

This post is partly in response to willas comment on my last post about English language data parsing.

“The man took his dog to the park. After playing ball and seeing a duck he went home.”

noel — Tue, 08 Mar 2005 14:45:53 +0000

Intriguing approach to searching unstructured data in the Grey Lady last week. Taking advantage of latent meaning in documents by parsing syntax begs for wider dissemination in commercial software. That’s business intelligence. Along with bottom-up metadata, I like where computer language analysis is going.