dave astels

Tonight I was exploring the current state of RubyCocoa (and it looks good), and I noticed a quote from Knuth’s “The Art of Computer Programming”, his 1974 ACM Turing Award Lecture.

Paul Graham has the text of the full lecture here.

This is a great talk, and should be required reading for anyone calling themselves a programmer. I found the last section, especially interesting.. here’s what I consider to be the core bit form it:

“Therefore I want to address my closing remarks to the system programmers and the machine designers who produce the systems that the rest of us must work with. Please, give us tools that are a pleasure to use, especially for our routine assignments, instead of providing something we have to fight with. Please, give us tools that encourage us to write better programs, by enhancing our pleasure when we do so.”

It struck me that Ruby and recent systems from Apple fill Knuth’s request quite nicely. According to Wikipedia, Knuth uses Macs.. I wonder how he thinks they answer his challenge from ‘74. I wonder what his view of Ruby is… Anyone heard anything about that?

My replacement PowerBook G4 batteries arrived this morning…. discharging the old ones now. I’m so glad they thought to include a note reminding me to unplug the power before discharging… wtf?

Update:

I’m actually very impressed with Apple. It only took a couple weeks for my new batteries to arrive. Given the number of batteries involved in the recall, that’s not bad at all.

Just awesome.

I just finished watching the video of Apple’s new product event of today.

I grabbed the new iTunes and it rocks. Good job folks. It really is a great leap forward.

I liked how Steve Jobs said “What do you think? Do you like it?” after demoing the new iTV product. Well.. I like it. Apple again shows how it kicks ass with class & cool. I’ll be in line when iTV is released.

I love watching these Apple events. It never ceases to make me realize all over again why I’m such an Apple fan.. and why I have been since my first Apple ][+. (OK.. there were some dark years when Steve Jobs wasn’t there).

Nice.

This is a bit of a retort to Nancy’s post earlier this evening, but it’s also an honest show of appreciation for a great system.

What I usually love about my Mac is that I hardly ever have to duck under the covers and use UNIX. It’s messy & crude.. I’d rather keep my hand on the mouse, thank you very much. But there are times I’m thankful for my SunOS & Linux background…

I was fiddling with an iTunes export of my collection and was wondering how many different kinds of files there were. An iTunes export is a big property list file, encoded in fairly lame XML. Each track has a “kind”, MP3, AAC, Protected AAC, MP4 video, etc. That information is stored in a key value pair where the key is “Kind”. Ok, just go through the file looking at the “kind” tags. Well… it’s over 14M of semantically barren XML. UNIX to the rescue. Drop into a terminal and start playing.

grep "<key>Kind" ../data/Library.xml

That gave me who-knows-how-many thousand “Kind” lines. Now to boil it down.

grep "<key>Kind" ../data/Library.xml | sort | uniq

Bingo. The 9 lines I was looking for.

You have to love having the sexiest hardware and sleekest GUI system… with all the raw power of a UNIX system just a terminal window away :)

As part of my getting back on the rails train, I’ve decided to give TextMate another try as well. So far, so good. Im making a concerted effort to learn the ins & outs of it. I had been using RadRails, but it’s big, and rather slow at times. Also, it’s very obviously *NOT* a Cocoa application. It felt gratingly out of place.

TextMate truly is a nice editor.. it’s no big surprise it won an Apple design award at WWDC earlier this month.

Given my Emacs based “upbringing”, TextMate feels nice. I’m looking forward to getting to know this app well.

UPDATE: While TextMate is a sweet text editor, I’ve since decided that it is not the programming editor for me.. I’ve switched to GNU Emacs on OS X for that.