Author Archives: synaesmedia

CLOjure SHell

I’ve been playing with CloSH, the Clojure Shell. And I have to say, I’m sold. If you’d like to have the full power of Clojure. And to write shell scripts that look like this : (doseq [f (expand "*jpg")     (println f)     (sh identify -format "%wx%h" (str f))     (println)) rather […]

What’s up? August 2019 Edition

Gosh … we’re half way through the year already. So what am I up to in programming? Clojure I still think it’s a wonderful language. Not doing as much as I’d like. But it’s still great. One thing I did a few months ago was port the terminal version of Mind Traffic Control to it. […]

How would you design the perfect programming language?

Another Quora answer I should be moving here : Phil Jones’s answer to How would you design the perfect programming language?   Well, the obvious way you’d approach it, is start with a reasonable knowledge of using other languages to get a sense for their strengths and weaknesses. And start with some good role models. […]

Tools for Reverse Engineering Binary File Formats

On Quora I asked a question : https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-good-tools-to-help-reverse-engineer-obscure-binary-file-formats What tools are there to help reverse engineer obscure binary file formats? So far the answers aren’t particularly informative. Basically hex editors. But I feel there must be something more. Here’s a comment I replied to someone there : Well, if I try to imagine “something better”, […]

Extra thoughts on “Assemblage” Oriented Programming

Brief followup thoughts on the previous article. Read that first. Classes? Classes are really just techniques to help construct objects. In an “Assemblage” language the Assemblage or Pattern itself is the way you construct the objects. The grammar explains how to parse a plain EDN or JSON-like data-literal into the assemblage. So perhaps we don’t […]

What’s wrong with OO?

Some thinking over at Quora : What’s wrong with OO? Continuing some thoughts that have been haunting me since I originally phrased them in the answer about designing the perfect programming language : Phil Jones’s answer to How would you design the perfect programming language?. And in response to Alan Mellor‘s comment on Phil Jones’s […]