Working through Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming

I am working through the famous CTM book, which looks like it could be like SICP for grownups.

CTM uses a language and platform called Mozart/Oz, which is freely downloadable and easy to get started with.

The development environment includes an Emacs-based REPL. It’s very easy to get started.

15 minutes after installing the program, I was able to code up the classic tail-recursive factorial:

declare
fun {Fact N}
   fun {FactIter N Acc}
      if N == 0 then
	 Acc
      else
	 {FactIter N-1 Acc*N}
      end
   end in {FactIter N 1}
end

{Browse {Fact 23}}

The first part defines our factorial function, and the second evaluates 23! and displays the result in the browser, which will be familiar to anyone who use has used Common Lisp.

(Yes, Oz has arbitary-precision integer arithmetic built in, like any sane modern programming language. Yes, Oz is apparently lexically scoped.)

All in all, it looks like the CTM book should be quite enjoyable. I’ve heard it’s readable and its coverage of different programming paradigms — object-oriented, concurrent, logic, functional, imperative, constraint-based, declarative — is nearly comprehensive.

Let the holiday language snobbery commence!

The triumph of open source; or, Walt Mossberg is an annoying self-centered ignoramus

Nothing bothers me more than unchallenged ignorance.

For example, in a video interview with 37Signals’ Jason Fried, near the end Mossberg says the following:

How much time do we have left? About three? Let’s spend that three minutes talking about why open source is a failure.

It’s not a failure in the IT department of corporations where people from Mars run those IT departments … There is one huge open source success, called Firefox…

I’ve never seen something so wrong from someone so high-profile, except maybe our warmonger president lying yet again.

Let’s have a quick jaunt over to the download statistics on SourceForge to see the numbers on some of the most-downloaded open source applications. Keep in mind, this doesn’t include OpenOffice which has downloads in the tens of millions. There are quite a few other open source apps with millions of downloads, like WordPress, that are also not present.

The first thing to note about the list is that it’s dominated by P2P apps and utilities - people like downloading porn and utilities that help them unzip compressed porn files so they can enjoy the bounties of the evening’s copyright infringement. Because of the nature of the most popular applications, probably the users don’t give a rat’s ass that it’s open source.

But more importantly, the numbers are quite remarkable - three of the applications have over 100 million downloads!

Let’s do a quick calculation and add up the total downloads on the top 50 SourceForge projects as of December 11, 2007. Let’s see, 373,890,600 + 157,418,200 + 135,341,394 + … = 1,462,719,263. That’s 1.4 billion. Basecamp has something on the order of one million users. That’s three fucking orders of magnitude difference. Popular P2P apps are in a completely different league of popularity compared to all these stupid little web apps which you have absolutely no control over.

Put differently, compared to Azureus or eMule, Basecamp is an astounding failure.

Have Walt Mossberg’s columns been read 1.4 billion times? The Wall Street Journal’s circulation is only 2 million — not bloody likely.

Maybe proprietary software apologists like Mossberg and Jason Fried should shut their fucking pieholes before spouting off at the mouth with a bunch of patently incorrect bullshit.