I see the official release of the Perl 6 language specification happened on Christmas day. The first piece of commercial web development I did was in Perl 5. A lot of people can probably say the same thing. This one was a content-management system led by James Elson in 1999 at PSWeb Ltd, a small… Continue reading Perl 6
Tag: nostalgic reverie
Alte Schönhauser Straße
In 1992, while I was an undergraduate at Bath university, I went to Berlin for an industrial placement year. I had started out registered for a 3-year maths degree without a placement, but there was a scheme you could apply to if you changed your mind and fancied going abroad in the middle of it.… Continue reading Alte Schönhauser Straße
Proprietary Unix
From 1992 to 1998, every paid job I did came with a Unix workstation on my desk. Admittedly that only covers three employers, but it covers a lot of different kinds of workstation. In those days, selling Unix software (unless you could dictate the hardware as well) involved a lot of porting, and companies would… Continue reading Proprietary Unix
Helios
I found my old Russian SLR camera a few days ago. It's a Zenit EM Olympic edition, a tie-in from the 1980 Moscow Olympics. The Russian Zenit, and more so its East German cousin the Praktica, were popular manual SLR cameras for beginner photographers in the UK in the 80s and 90s. I got mine… Continue reading Helios
Functional programming and the joy of learning something again
Twenty years ago, as a maths-and-computing undergraduate at the university of Bath, I was introduced to functional programming using the ML language by the excellent Julian Padget. We undergrads were set the traditional assignment of writing a sed-like text processor in ML, and found it first baffling and then, if we were lucky, rather exciting.… Continue reading Functional programming and the joy of learning something again
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M., brandishing new telephone: I find it a bit difficult to actually make phone calls, but it's great for the internet. No, I really like it. The battery's hopeless though. Me: How often do you have to charge it? M.: About every two days. I thought it was defective at first. A fun mental exercise… Continue reading Buy Our Superior Celluloid Cylinders
The Breakfast Post 