Some things which happened while I wasn’t blogging

indeyets — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 08:22:46 +0000

Haiku OS reported on their Google Summer of Code results

Makes me think, that I should really-really get some old mac-mini and install Haiku on it. At least, I can program some fancy Jukebox out of it

ohloh.net: The World’s Oldest Source Code Repositories

Hey! I was only 1 year old, when they started to use version control!

DSource: LLVM D Compiler

I love D language, I love LLVM â€” they make such a beautiful couple. Project is not complete, yet, but it already works for simple cases. Author needs any man-power he can get: spread the word, please.

Sam Ruby noticed CouchDB: Ascetic Database Architectures

It brought some more attention to CouchDB, which is really-really deserved. CouchDB is a document-oriented non-relational database written by Damien Katz and Jan Lehnardt in erlang, which has JSON, PHP and Ruby APIs (the number of APIs grows each day).

Opera released 3 public alpha-versions of their 9.5 series

Finally, Opera looks like a native application on mac. It is lightning fast with a new javascript-engine and heavily optimized UI code. I already use 9.5 on daily basis without problems, but your mileage may differ â€” it is an alpha-version, after all. Get it here

PHP 5.3 will have Late Static Binding

LSB will allow static methods to know about inheritance (to know, on which of the descendant-classes the method was actually called). Which means, that it will be possible to make a good-looking ActiveRecord implementation, after all these years.

BeOS + SmallTalk

indeyets — Sun, 03 Jun 2007 19:34:55 +0000

Some internal feeling makes me believe, that Smalltalk would be an ideal language for Haiku-OS/OpenBeOS (which looks more and more alive, again).

BeOS was always about C++, opposing UNIX’es, MacOS’es and Windows’es choice of C (well, formally, windows had C++ api, but, still, it was very C-ish in it’s essence). Years passed, MacOS switched to Objective-C, Windows switched to C#. Both of these languages are higher-level OOP languages which have some kind of memory-management. C++, while it has some advantages, still is not as easy and dynamic as these languages are.

Unfortunately, both Objective-C and C# are developed by Apple and Microsoft (correspondingly) behind the closed-doors.

So, what is the alternative? I see two of them:

D
Smalltalk

D is good, as it makes a step from C++ to real life, but is still low-levelish, by design. memory management will solve some headaches, but programming in it won’t be as fun as it can be. I like to see D as a language for writing libraries.

Smalltalk, on the other hand, is a high-level dynamic language which is just what is needed. Once you “taste” the fruit of dynamic languages you wouldn’t want to code high-level tasks in static-languages anymore (static is extremely good in low-level, though). To give you a brief idea on what all this is about, there is a nice article by a game developer who switched from C++ to Smalltalk: Learning to Talk: Introduction to Talking.

Alexey Zakhlestins blog » beos

Some things which happened while I wasn’t blogging

BeOS + SmallTalk