Dec 29, 2014

Great things and people that I discovered, learned, read, met, etc. in 2014. No particular ordering is implied. Not everything is new.

also: see the lists from 2013, 2012, 2011 and 2010

Great blog posts read

Most viewed blog posts by me (20K+ viewers)

I’ve been scaling back on blogging this past year and have tried something different instead – Read-Eval-Print-λove. That said, there were a couple of high-traffic posts on my blog.

10 Technical Papers Every Programmer Should Read (At Least Twice) — My most popular post of 2011 was also my most popular of 2012 and also of 2013 and also of 2014 — go figure. Timothy Hart, Rest in Peace — Timothy Hart was the father of LISP macros.

Favorite technical books discovered (and read)

Creating Interactive Fiction with Inform7 — Inform7 is a perspective-altering programming language. It’s nearly the pinnacle of languages that are informed (hah) by the types of problems that they’re attempting to solve. Beautiful.

Object Oriented Forth — Honestly, I can’t think of better tech literature available than those written about Forth.

Ruby Under a Microscope — I’ll honestly say that I went into this book expecting the worst. However, I was pleasantly surprised when I was done that the book is a fairly nice dive into the Ruby internals. I’m frankly shocked that a book like this was even published, but once again the long tail reigns supreme; much to our benefit.

Programmer avec Scheme — I read this in a marathon 3-days during Strange Loop 2014 thanks to Nada Amin, who hauled it all the way across the planet for me to read. I’d really love to get another chance to go through it and digest it, but I did like it very much on my first pass. My favorite part was that while the prose was French, the code too was “very French” also!

Favorite non-technical books read

Number of books read

a bunch

Number of books published

1.

Number of books written

0

Language zoo additions

JS relational algebra thingy and Black

Favorite musicians discovered

Mississippi John Hurt, Memory Tapes, Black Ace, The Pilgrim Travelers, Mildred Bailey, Baby Huey and the Babysitters (via mrb_bk)

Interesting games discovered

Catchup — The link conveys my thoughts on this beautiful game. Huge thanks to Zeeshan for all the games this year.

Koi-Koi — A game that when you’re done you’ve created something beautiful.

Splendor — This is considered an “engine-building” game that would appeal to many a programmer IMO.

Entropy — Quite possibly my favorite game discovered this year even though I only just found it. Pure beauty in conception and execution. This is one of the few games that I wish I had thought of first.

Alfred’s Wyke — A strange little game that baffles me how anyone could have even thought of it.

Undercut — A sinister auction game turned on its head.

Favorite TV series about zombies

The Walking Dead

Favorite programming languages (or related) I’ve hacked

Clojure,2 ClojureScript, Haskell, Datalog, Frink, Racket, Erlang

Programming languages used for projects both professional and not this year

Clojure, ClojureScript, Java, JavaScript, Datalog, Haskell, Python

Programming languages that I’m dying to explore next year

Black — After seeing Nada Amin’s keynote I was compelled to run out and find out more about Black.

Idris — Idris is

probably the most exciting language that I’ve seen since I found Clojure.

probably the most exciting language that I’ve seen since I found Clojure. LFE — Lisp. Flavored. Erlang. Need I say more?

Squeak and/or Pharo— It’s time.

Inform7 — A lovely language meant for creating interactive fiction, with a syntax that’s pseudo-natural.

Joy — I’m in constant fear that this language will be forgotten.

Number of papers read

≈ 12 (again, a very slow year for me in the paper department)

Favorite papers discovered (and read)

Still haven’t read…

Snow Crash, Spook Country, A Fire upon the Deep, Norwegian Wood, The Contortionists Handbook and a boat-load of scifi

Favorite conference attended

Clojure/conj 2014

Favorite code read

Om (Clojure) — A manifestation of the ideas in the paper “Worlds: Controlling the Scope of Side Effects“ 3

Z3 (Verilog) — Learning about Inform7 has gotten me interested in exploring the Z-Machine more deeply. It was good timing when I discovered this project to create a hardware impl of the Z3 machine. I don’t fully understand it, but it’s gotten me motivated to try.

Dominion (Haskell) — For some reason my favorite Haskell programs to study tend to be game implementations. I suppose they have the right mix of logic, complexity, data structure considerations, and I/O.

Black (Scheme) — I recommend reading the code side-by-side with the paper (listed above).

type-systems (OCaml) — The fruit flies of type system theory. A nice place to start learning the subject IMO.

Life changing technology discovered

None.

State of plans from 2013

Plans for 2015

Publish (at least) one issue of Read-Eval-Print-λove

UCT in Clojure

Treaps in Clojure

Release secret project Phenomena

Publish a card game of my own design

Implement Lines of Action in an interesting language

Contribute to other peoples’ OSS projects more often.

Onward to 2015!

:F