Scott Yang's Playground

3 virtues for programmers – laziness, impatience and hubris. Sounds like you need to be a scum to be a good program.

Interesting question raised on why people use Perl, Python and Java instead of Smalltalk and Lisp, and this comment is really insightful. At the end, a purists’ academic language would not guarantee commercial success, as it lacks integration, has limited libraries and sometimes just do not fit into development cycle of existing projects.

RAII is a good programming semantic. It is great in C++, but it is less useful in languages that come with automatic garbage collection, like Java or Python, due to the nature of object destruction is indeterministic.

Interesting article by Paul Graham on attribute of great hackers. Note: hackers are those who see programming as fun and good code as a great piece of art. And great analysis by Eric Sink on Paul’s article. Yes. I feel for you. As for small ISV’s, I agree with the advise – you don’t need [...]

I must be the last one on the planet to know about this release. But just in case that I am not, PHP 5.0.0 has just been released. I’ll wait until Gentoo ebuild is released, emerge it, and then see how many of my applications break.

Being a Python programmer for the past 3 and half years, today was the first time when I tried Jython, an implementation of Python in Java, which runs inside a JVM. I am porting one part of the project in Java, and I would like to examine some values interactively instead of going through the [...]

sh, perl & ruby are best scripting languages? It is surely going to start a flame war. But my next language would be OCaml.

Here is an interesting article by David Mertz on XML processing in Python. David looked at different light weight XML to Python data structure parsers available, and their advantage on speed and flexibility over standard DOM.