metalinguistic musings and other related ramblings

I was talking to Ole today about regular expressions, and one of the problems with regular expressions is that it, like SQL, compounds the actual problem into on string, thus making it very hard to read again. Luckily we now have ORM’s to take care of most of the SQL mess, but regular expressions hasn’t received the same kind of limelight. I immediately thought that one could use a similar technique to deal with the regular expression problem, just by expression it as a language (DSL) and running something like LINQ on it. And of course, several people has already been doing this. Nifty stuff!

Almost forgot to mention that Yayart did an interview with pictures from my home of the art I bought. You can read it here.

Just finished reading Lessig’s latest book. I’ve been widely fascinated by his earlier work, but this one falls short compared to his other work on the subject of copyright in modern society. The first two parts is more or less just rehashing of old ideas, while the last part, about the future, is where the book really shines. More specifically it mentions five ways in which we can actually change copyright to make it better suited for the world we live in now.

He presents an interesting story about the problems they had in the southern states of America with racial discrimination. The problem was that if stores opened their doors to African Americans then they would be seen as pro-black and loose a lot of their original business. So in 1964 (!) a law was passed that made discrimination in public restaurants and other related establishments a felony. This changed the game completely. This reminds me of a law that was passed not that long ago in Denmark, that made smoking in the same kind of places a felony.

I had a real “aha moment” today while coding some javascript. Let me first start this post with a quote:

The venerable master Qc Na was walking with his student, Anton.  Hoping to
prompt the master into a discussion, Anton said "Master, I have heard that
objects are a very good thing - is this true?"  Qc Na looked pityingly at
his student and replied, "Foolish pupil - objects are merely a poor man's
closures."

  Chastised, Anton took his leave from his master and returned to his cell,
intent on studying closures.  He carefully read the entire "Lambda: The
Ultimate..." series of papers and its cousins, and implemented a small
Scheme interpreter with a closure-based object system.  He learned much, and
looked forward to informing his master of his progress.

  On his next walk with Qc Na, Anton attempted to impress his master by
saying "Master, I have diligently studied the matter, and now understand
that objects are truly a poor man's closures."  Qc Na responded by hitting
Anton with his stick, saying "When will you learn? Closures are a poor man's
object."  At that moment, Anton became enlightened.

When I first read this some time ago I thought I understood it. I did not I now understand and my aha moment today proved that. I have written way too little pure functional programming to really appreciate and use the power of closures. Not to say that objects are useless. That’s exactly the point of the quoted text. Just that the ability to define closures inside closures inside closures is a really really powerful concept. The idea is that sometimes code gets repeated in a function inside a class. Typically you pull that into a helper function and stick it on the class, but sometimes the function is so specialized that it has no livelihood in the class. Secondly the ability to bind local objects to closures, and use those closures as state is another aspect of closures that is immensely powerful.

Firefox 3.1 will have geolocation support, allowing some interesting new web applications to come to the web platform. I really like what this will do for devices like the n810. They also announced alpha1 of their mobile brower version, fennec. Sadly its incredibly slow, something that hopefully will be fixed as the browser matures for the first real release.