January 31, 2012
This kind of thing (here illustrated in haskell) was brought up in freenode's #python-offtopic:
let ones = 1:ones
This works because haskell is lazy; it doesn't try to evaluate the second part of the
list ones until it needs it. When it does need it, it just goes back and looks up ones,
and sees that it's 1 followed by some other stuff ad infinitum.
(read more)
December 22, 2011
I spent a lot of time setting up this blog, and that's kind of ridiculous. I liked Blogofile a whole lot when I first saw it, but it's not being maintained anymore -- the latest commit on Github was in May. And I love the idea of using a static blog compiler and Git, but I don't like some things Blogofile does.
So anyway, this project is a sort of reaction against all of that. It's called Cytoplasm and I hope you like it. I spent the last few minutes converting this website to use it and I think I'm happy with it.
I'm going to spell out some of the things I didn't like about Blogofile.
(read more)
November 30, 2011
I finished National Novel Writing Month yesterday, clocking in a day early at nearly 10:00 PM with 50,389 words. That's fifty thousand, three hundred and eighty nine -- fifty thousand! Even looking at a number that big makes me proud and a little worried.
It's tentatively called The Lantern in the Cave.
Writing is hard. It really is. Sometimes I had no idea what to write next, or where my plot was going, or how to phrase something so it would make sense. These are all things that seem obvious but I had that subconscious feeling often shared by non-writers that "ideas" are the hard part. But stories (or my stories, at least) aren't made by a flash of brilliance that illuminates the whole thing; the important, difficult part is to keep writing every day.
I think that's the sneaky purpose of NaNoWriMo, to let everyone know that you don't have to be an archetypical genius to write something great or even worthwhile.
(read more)