www.nickhodge.com

Today, at least in the US, it is Programmer’s Day.

Maybe it should be called “Inter­na­tional Pro­gram­ming Lan­guage Peace Day”. The level of advocacy for vari­ous pro­gram­ming lan­guages reaches rhet­or­ical heights last seen dur­ing the one of the not-so-successful 18^th cen­tury revolutions.

When not speak­ing to humans, other pro­gram­mers to read­ing the latest advocacy on their lan­guage of choice: pro­gram­mers stitch together the wild thoughts of oth­ers to munge data into inform­a­tion.

Pro­gram­mers are the people who use com­puter lan­guages, in their vari­ous forms, to get com­puters to do cool things. From bliken­lights to cool online maps: there are a pyr­amid of pro­gram­mers respons­ible for your com­puter exper­i­ence. A pro­gram­mer is behind the “ding” in the lift you used this morn­ing; and the soft­ware that val­id­ated your ticket on the bus ride to work.

The beauty of com­puter lan­guages is that they never seem to stag­nate: like mod­ern, spoken lan­guages: they evolve as the world changes. Except those that are aban­don­ware.

Microsoft has recently released my cur­rent favour­ite pro­gram­ming lan­guage, Python, as a CLR/.net lan­guage: Iron­Py­thon. This imple­ments Python as a dynamic lan­guage on the CLR engine.

C# is the lan­guage of imple­ment­a­tion for CLR, as is Sun’s Java is for the JVM. A# (Ada), B#, D# F# (OCaml), G# (Gen­er­at­ive lan­guage), J# (Jsharp), P# (Pro­log), L#. More sharps than Beeth­oven.

The lan­guage wars has returned to an old field: dynamic lan­guages. The grand-daddy of dynamic lan­guages, LISP, has received some recent pos­it­ive PR. One per­son, Paul Gra­ham, is the poster mil­lion­aire for LISP. Laz­arus of LISP.

This week, Sun Microsys­tems par­ried Microsoft’s Iron­Py­thon by hir­ing the team behind JRuby. The aim here is to imple­ment the Ruby dynamic lan­guage on the Java Vir­tual Machine (JVM). Some months ago, this team was able to get a Ruby on Rails work­ing on the JVM.

Whilst the big lan­guage guys battle it out, is Erlang the next Ruby, or is it just a vik­ing proto-language with the best non-pun name? The Erlang com­munity is start­ing to come out of their tele­phone exchanges.

No lan­guage has deemed to have arrived in the 21^st Cen­tury until there is a web frame­work writ­ten around it. C# is ASP.NET, Python has Dyango, Ruby has Rails, Erlang has Jaws, Scheme has Magic… and so it goes on.

This broken thing called Javas­cript that has been reborn with AJAX, and is receiv­ing daily blood trans­fu­sions of new features.

All of these lan­guages just remind me of my per­sonal all­time favour­ite lan­guage love of my life: Hypercard’s Hyper­Talk. As Hyper­card is no longer sold, and “Clas­sic MacOS” is a battle to get going on my Mac­Book Pro — sadly it is a lan­guage as use­ful as Cornish.

So, for a short period of time it is back to one of HyperTalk’s chil­dren: Applescript. Bas­ketweav­ing for the mind.

I am half-famous: Moonshine2: The art of Script­ing to make your own Distillery

pdated script (Javas­cript) for Import­ing Text files into InDes­ign CS:
Import Words into InDes­ign CS Dictionary

A very use­ful script for clean­ing up badly format­ted text: Multi Find and Change By Steve Nich­ols. Writ­ten on the train, evidently!

Shane Stan­ley, the god of AppleScript, has writ­ten a great art­icle on the Changes in InDes­ign CS’s scripting

InDes­ign 2.0: Adding Tab to Table Cells. Pretty eso­teric. There is a MacOS ver­sion here Add Tab to Cell Con­tents Script (MacOS .sit from adobeevangelists.com)

Thanks to Tim Cole’s per­ster­ing, InDes­ign 2.0: Past­ing As Text Only on Win­dows is a Win­dows ver­sion of Paste as Text Only (MacOS .sit from adobeevangelists.com). Don’t thank me, thank Tim.

Worked out how to read the raw Apache logs for this site, and found some inter­est­ing errors. Oops! Cleaned up some broken links, learnt how to do favicon.ico images for the URL and when adding to history/favourites. Not too hard, really.

Time to learn a new pro­gram­ming lan­guage. PERL or Python? I decided on Python.

Present­a­tion from Open­Pub­lish 2002. Scripting+XML=Productivity

InDes­ign 2.0: Auto­mat­ing Adding Words to the Dictionary

One of the furphies (mis­state­ments, lies, errors) is that a com­pos­ite PDF can­not hold spot col­ours. Wrong. InDes­ign 2.0 and Illus­trator 10 change the rules here too some­what: both can cre­ate com­pos­ite, trapped PDF with trans­par­ency. Before these applic­a­tions, doing this relied on high end, “prepress” sys­tems. Will need to write more about this soon…

Some­thing from the archives of my email. Script­ing Spot Col­our Changes in Illus­trator 10