you sent me six mails in September, six in October and by November 6th I haver already received three. I did not want to check the all opt out box because I’m interested to be informed about you, but I do not accept to be spammed monthly, so I just checked the damn box.

You used to be nicer, but lately Forrester is much nicer: it only sends two emails per month.

So, because all the Prolog papers I was reviewing were referencing Programming in Prolog by W. F. Clocksin and C. S. Mellish I bought an older (and cheap) edition to re-read. I was surprised how good the book is for learning to program in Prolog.

You can use the wonderful Learn Prolog Now! as a free introduction text, but Clocksin and Mellish chapters on grammar rules, debugging and laying out programs makes the book priceless.

And if you want to use prolog for ‘practical matters’ I strongly recommend Jan Wielemaker Ph. D. disertation: Logic programming for knowledge-intensive interactive applications. You’ll find a good overview about using Prolog outside the logic course: Web, multi-threaded, RDFs, literate programming, interfacing with object-oriented systems and interfacing with C for creating data storages.

Finally, If you come from the functional programming world, download Scrap Your Boilerplate—Prologically! a Prolog version of the Scrap Your Boilerplate set of papers. It is a great addition for learning Prolog if your background is functional.

• Condition style guide by Nikodemus Siivola
• Beyond Exception Handling: Conditions and Restarts from the always great Practical Common Lisp

I suppose the emergence of Ruby and the renewed interest in Smalltalk and lisp-based languages like Clojure made DSL an interesting topic for blog posts.

But I must admit that maybe we need to explain what DSL means… or why a good API design is always needed, because:

// describe the optimization problem
LinearObjectiveFunction f = new LinearObjectiveFunction(new double[] {-2,1}, -5);
Collection constraints = new ArrayList();
constraints.add(new LinearConstraint(new double[] {1,2}, Relationship.LEQ, 6));
constraints.add(new LinearConstraint(new double[] {3,2}, Relationship.LEQ, 12));
constraints.add(new LinearConstraint(new double[] {0,1}, Relationship.GEQ, 0));

// create and run the solver
RealPointValuePair solution = new SimplexSolver().optimize(f, constraints, GoalType.MINIMIZE, false);

// get the solution
double x = solution.getPoint()[0];
double y = solution.getPoint()[1];
double min = solution.getValue();

…is not a good API Ben.

• IIS memory leaks when coding ASP pages because it was a threaded server.
• Huge MS SQL server code in the database because developers came from C/S backgrounds.
• Low level dll development interfacing with .asp pages through COM because .asp was not fast enough.
• Registering manually the COM/VB code each time we had to deploy a new release.
• Sacking MS consutants trying to sell you DNA.

I have no idea about Ruby on Rails, but you can botch a MS stack pretty easily.

Also, why do you want to make the Ruby on Rails comunity angry? I have no doubt they’re rabid fanboys, but I know who you are, so don’t be child and stop nagging the children.

I’ve been getting back to knowledge based applications again and again and Jan’s thesys looks good enough to invest some time reading the 257 pdf file. 

Additionally, the swi-prolog site has an interesting page with some additional publications.

Executing the rsync algorithm on the client side has two main advantages: first of all, you can zsync over any protocol (zsync is able to syncronize over HTTP). Additionally, it avoids the high server load associated with running the algorithm on the server.

Ah! And it is able to handle compressed files.

(defun |#q-reader| (stream sub-char numarg)
  (declare (ignore sub-char numarg))
  (let ((terminator (read-char stream)))
    (loop for ch = (read-char stream)
          until (eql ch terminator)
          collect ch into chars
          finally (return (coerce chars 'string)))))
 
(set-dispatch-macro-character
    #\# #\q #'|#q-reader|)

More information in Space Station Lambda.

You can find CL-INTERPOL in Edi Weitz’s website.

 To avoid loss of face, a Chinese employee will not say that he only understood half of what his expat colleague tells him. This leads to misunderstandings, and ultimately to a lot of time lost.

We encountered a lot of these problems working with the outsourcing team that made all our 3D models. The same mistakes would be made over and over again because the modeling team didn’t understand the comments we made on their work, package names would have spelling errors in them, etc.

Towards the end of the project, these problems gradually became smaller, as Chinese artists started to understand English better and expatriates became more proficient in the Chinese language. More bilingual support, both at Spicy Horse and at the outsourcing studio, would have helped a lot in the beginning, though.
 

Globally, the experience is positive.