| The weekly digest for developers |
| ISSUE 1 - February 8, 2012 | |
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Welcome to the first Status Code! Sorry for the delay. Things aren't at 100% yet but I'm working hard over the next few weeks so SC can soon be at its best. Thanks for joining me on this journey! Today I'm mostly setting the tone by sharing interesting items found over the last few months while working on the newsletter. In future, the links will be more timely but I hope you enjoy this 'free for all' issue anyway :-) Your humble curator, headlinesTravis CI needs your help! — Travis is a popular open source continuous integration server used by projects like Parrot, Rails, and Symfony. They're raising funds to continue pushing Travis forward.
4 New HTTP Status Codes: A New Proposed Standard —
The IETF has approved this draft standard for additional HTTP status codes as a 'Proposed Standard'. Code 429 'Too Many Requests' is specifically aimed at rate limiting situations.
Perl One-Liners Explained — A new (paid) e-book that walks through 130 unique one-liners in Perl explaining what makes them tick.
Microsoft releases a public C++ AMP specification — C++ AMP (Accelerated Massive Parallelism) is a new C++ technology in Visual Studio 11 to improve the use of tools like the GPU for parallel programming. It now has an open spec.
readingDoes 'untyped' also mean 'dynamically typed' in CS academia? — The surprising answer to these modern ears is 'yes' but with provisos. Some interesting history behind this outcome.
What the Heck are Algebraic Data Types? (for Programmers) — A gentle entry level introduction to algebraic data types, a core part of languages like Haskell and OCaml. No formal math qualifications required here!
Creating the Smallest x86 ELF 'Hello World' Binary — Some attempts at creating the smallest x86 ELF binary that would say Hello World on Ubuntu Linux. The result? 142 bytes.
Drawing Circles — A dig into some interesting approaches to drawing circles, ending up at a technique that uses only addition, subtraction and bit shifts.
Programming Language Development: The Past 5 Years —
A look at several new programming languages embracing interesting features or creative new ways of thinking about programming. Languages include Ioke, Go, Arc and CoffeeScript.
Why Lua? — Lua is a lightweight, highly extensible scripting language that's becoming more popular recently. Here, we get 7 simple reasons why it's worth taking a look at.
Effective Scala: Scala best practices — Twitter is working an 'effective Scala guide' to share a series of Scala best practices. You can read it all online here.
Let's Build an MP3 Decoder — Quite an old post but I only found it this week and it's an excellent introduction to the practicalities of coding an MP3 decoder.
releaseswatchingBjarne Stroustup's GoingNative keynote on C++11 style — C++'s creator riffs on the principles, techniques, and idioms behind producing quality code, and argues in favor of type-rich interfaces, compact data structures, integrated resource management and error handling, as provided by C++11, the latest C++ spec.
The Haskell Journey, From 1990 to 2011 — The figurehead of the Haskell functional programming language talks about Haskell's history and how it has evolved from a purely academic exercise to an innovative and well used language today.
usefulGitLab: Open Source Git Repo Manager — Fancy running your own local 'GitHub-lite'? GitLab is a step in that direction.
Web Equation — Convert hand written (or mouse scribbled) equations into LaTeX or MathML on the fly with this Web based tool.
upcoming developer eventsO'Reilly Strata — Santa Clara, CA; Feb 28-Mar 1
QCon London — London, Mar 5-9 2012
EclipseCon North America — Reston, VA; Mar 26-29 2012
O'Reilly Where — San Francisco, Apr 2-4
Scandinavian Developer Conference — Goteberg, Sweden; Apr 16-19 2012
Bacon — London, Apr 20-21 2012
O'Reilly Fluent — San Francisco, May 29-31
lighter bitesquote of the week"The lurking suspicion that something could be simplified is the world's richest source of rewarding challenges."
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