{"id":299,"date":"2009-08-24T19:42:31","date_gmt":"2009-08-24T10:42:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.monomorphic.org\/wordpress\/?p=299"},"modified":"2009-12-08T16:27:55","modified_gmt":"2009-12-08T07:27:55","slug":"a-couple-of-quick-ideas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.monomorphic.org\/wordpress\/a-couple-of-quick-ideas\/","title":{"rendered":"A couple of quick ideas"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m currently in Sweden, enjoying the Scandinavian nature, catching up with family and a few old friends.<\/p>\n<p>This time, some quick notes on a few ideas that have been brewing.<\/p>\n<p><em>Orthopraxy<\/em> is when people do things the same way: &#8220;correct&#8221; action\/praxis. On Artima developer spotlight, there was a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.artima.com\/forums\/flat.jsp?forum=270&amp;thread=262798\">lively discussion<\/a> on this in the Ruby community: is Ruby a language that is less <em>patronizing<\/em> to the programmer than many other languages? That is, does it enforce orthopraxy to a lesser extent than other languages? In very established languages such as Java, orthopraxy does not just come from language design though; it comes from the culture surrounding the language. Today it is so mature that there is a very small number of accepted styles and accepted ways of coding. This does make people more productive by easing communication, but I wonder if we could have both ease of communication and stylistic freedom&#8230;?<\/p>\n<p><em>Garbage collection<\/em> in society is the collection of discarded resources: entropy has gone so far that we banish used up objects to a heap of rubbish. Some of these may be immediately recyclable, most of them will take a long time to disintegrate fully. In software, garbage collection is about reclaiming the space used by lost objects that can no longer be used by the program. As such it&#8217;s more about recycling &#8211; all the memory is reused pretty much instantaneously. The trick here is finding those lost objects and putting the memory to use in a good way. Finally, in life, when plants or animals die, they become part of new plants and animals in a normal ecosystem. Isn&#8217;t this garbage collection on a molecular\/atomic level? Maybe even as high as on the protein level.<\/p>\n<p><em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.scala-lang.org\/node\/242\">Actor programming<\/a><\/em> in Scala is something I casually started experimenting with for a text processing tool, and it turned out to be a very pleasant way of doing parallel computation. The asynchronous message queues were a much nicer way of doing things than the conventional monitor\/mutex methods. I recommend trying to use it for something. In Scala they can equally easily be made threadless (usually each runs on its own thread), making support for a huge number of actors trivial.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m currently in Sweden, enjoying the Scandinavian nature, catching up with family and a few old friends. This time, some quick notes on a few ideas that have been brewing. Orthopraxy is when people do things the same way: &#8220;correct&#8221; action\/praxis. On Artima developer spotlight, there was a lively discussion on this in the Ruby [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[20,49],"tags":[39,21],"class_list":["post-299","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-philosophy","tag-nature","tag-society"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/py2qT-4P","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monomorphic.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monomorphic.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monomorphic.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monomorphic.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monomorphic.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=299"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.monomorphic.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":437,"href":"https:\/\/www.monomorphic.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299\/revisions\/437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monomorphic.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monomorphic.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monomorphic.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}