141–150 of 155 posts
1.Haskell or "how I learned to stop worrying (about monads) and just do io." Still fighting with the type system occasionally but I think it's getting better.
2.Erlang - I so love this language. The concurrency support makes me think about programming the way I want to think about programming. I also like that's it's most of the fun of functional programming (Haskell style) but without having to deal with types.
Apologies for blowing my own trumpet, but pound for pound, the neatest thing I've worked with this year is a C++ template I wrote. I like to have the tightest possible scoping of names, but a common pattern makes that difficult. If you've got a function that produces a good value or indicates that it couldn't do so one way to write it is: Type theVar; if (theFunction(theVar) { /*do something with theVar*/ } theFuncti…
While my area is currently graphics/simulation I'm wondering how effective adding GPUs as accelerators to large scale web problems would be. It's really taking of in the Super Computing area, so I'm sure there is room for it!
· Rails 3 became everything I wanted Rails to be — I've come from Django and am really loving the ecosystem and the way the documentation has matured.
· Varnish — just an awesome piece of software. Fantastic job of caching, from small sites to large, without having to write mountains of config files. It's something you can drop it from an early stage with little cost in time, and know it'll be ready to help an application as it grows/scales.
· SSD's: didn't realise how good they were until I got a machine with one. I don't think I can buy a new machine without one now.
Solid State Discs in everything. Ok, perhaps not what you were asking, but they made a big difference for me. I have two, raid0 in my desktop, and a sandforce in my MBP. What a difference. Compiling, linking, copying, everything not just faster, but almost instantaneous. Yum.
Buying an SSD was a huge disappointment for me. Programs were not "almost instantaneous" but just 2-3 times faster to load if there was a difference at all. So OpenOffice took 3 seconds instead of 7, not worth the huge price difference for me. Compiling is CPU bound, I noticed no mentionable difference there. It might be worth it if you use a "bloaty" OS with virus scanners and indexers running or have specific use c…
Also, there really is a difference between SSDs available right now. My Kingston SSDs have blocksizes of 120k (!). My OCZ Vertex2 has blocksize of 4k. Its 4k write speed is off the chart. Like 40x faster than some SSDs.
I'm on OSX (2 cores), Windows (8 cores) and CentOS (4 cores).
1. MongoDB / Mongoid have blown me away this year. Is now my default database for new rails projects. 2. CoffeeScript language is an amazing replacement for Javascript. I can't see myself going back to pure JS at any point in the future. 3. Rails 3 finally feels like a stable and maintainable web framework. All the web frameworks now all seem to work together using Rack. The ruby web development world is really a nic…
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Buying an SSD was a huge disappointment for me. Programs were not "almost instantaneous" but just 2-3 times faster to load if there was a difference at all. So OpenOffice took 3 seconds instead of 7, not worth the huge price difference for me. Compiling is CPU bound, I noticed no mentionable difference there. It might be worth it if you use a "bloaty" OS with virus scanners and indexers running or have specific use c…
You need more CPUs then :-) Also, there really is a difference between SSDs available right now. My Kingston SSDs have blocksizes of 120k (!). My OCZ Vertex2 has blocksize of 4k. Its 4k write speed is off the chart. Like 40x faster than some SSDs. I'm on OSX (2 cores), Windows (8 cores) and CentOS (4 cores).
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0mq is fantastic. I just wish it had some way to put a socket in a half-open state: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3692854/how-should-a-zero... ETA: `zmq_poll()` is nice, but some way to make it play nicely with other event loops (like libev's) would be even better.
This exists in ømq 2.1 ( https://github.com/zeromq/zeromq2/tree/v2.1.0 ). You can get access to the raw socket, which allows you to plug it into anything that understands sockets. This is what was done for zeromq.node to tie ømq into node.js.
JRuby. It's just rock-solid, wonderfully fast and easy-to-use, it's now at the center of my product. Many props to Charles Nutter et al for this!
Despite being responsible for Monkeybars, I actually hadn't used JRuby that much this past year, being mostly caught up in a Rails gig (which I thought might run under JRuby, but is not).
However, having gotten a Kintect I'm hooking into the C libs via JRuby and some nice JNI wrappers some smart Kinect hackers have written. So I can use JRuby + Monkeybars for the GUI.