The I Am The Greatest programmer "firmly believes that he is the greatest programmer to have walked the earth and has the three-line version of Tetris to prove it. He spent most of his undergraduate days in the terminal room and only got a degree because he could break security and decrypt the exam answers. Thinks in a mixture of C and assembly language, thinks Real Programmers are sissies, has memorised even the unwritten volumes of Knuth (who he believes sold out the moment he started writing TeX) and has most of the source to obsolete Unix kernels in his room"

The My Favorite Toy Language programmer "knows the solution to the problem. The only problem is, we haven't got a compiler for the language that it should be implemented in. MFTL knows only two languages; his favourite toy language and the language you need to compile its compiler. (If a language can compile its own compiler then it isn't a toy!)."

Academic Programmers: A Spotter's Guide

The Mail Archive: an archiving service for electronic mailing lists.

"Many people are wondering how our President George W. Bush went from a stumbling, error-prone, inarticulate speaker to a fairly coherent presenter, especially in the last 9 months..." --Bush The Articulate

Lovecraft's Pnakotic Manuscripts, Douglas Adam's Where God Went Wrong and Who is This God Person Anyway?, Borges' First Encyclopedia of Tlon and many others imaginary books listed in The Invisible Library

"Your latest article was so inspiring." #6 on The Top Ten Lies Told by Graduate Students

- Safe multithreading! Immutable data structures are not subject to data race conditions, and consequently don't have to be protected by locks

- The ability to have your cake and eat it: imagine you have a complex OO system processing messages - every component might make state changes depending on the message and then forward the message to some objects it has links to. Wouldn't it be just too cool to be able to easily rollback every change if some object deep in the call hierarchy decided the message is flawed? How about having a history of different states?

- Many housekeeping tasks made for you: deconstructing data structures (PatternMatching), storing variable bindings (lexical scope with closures), strong typing (TypeInference), garbage collection, storage allocation, whether to use boxed (pointer-to-value) or unboxed (value directly) representation...

Some Advantages of Functional Programming
More... (ML/OCaml specific)

Pancito: mathematical image transformation using functional languages

Should open source software be restricted?

Amazing, high-quality map of terror from indymedia.
(Thanks to James)

(Thanks to James)

"A key piece of evidence linking Iraq to a nuclear weapons program appears to have been fabricated, the United Nations' chief nuclear inspector said yesterday in a report that called into question U.S. and British claims about Iraq's secret nuclear ambitions."

Just say "NO" to secret CIA brainwashing experiments

Twenty hours of videotaped talks on the SICP

"intellectual freedom is essential to human society--freedom to obtain and distribute information, freedom for open-minded and unfearing debate and freedom from pressure by officialdom and prejudices. Such a trinity of freedom of thought is the only guarantee against an infection of people by mass myths, which in the hands of treacherous hypocrites and demagogues, can be transformed into bloody dictatorship. Freedom of thought is the only guarantee of the feasibility of a scientific democratic approach to politics, economics and culture" --Andrei Sakharov

Oil industry analyst admits Iraq war is being fought for oil
(Thanks to Mike)

BerliOS is a free service to Open Source developers offering easy access to the best in CVS, mailing lists, bug tracking, message boards/forums, task management, site hosting, permanent file archival, full backups, and total web-based administration

On hiring mainstream language programmers

Sheer hypocricy from the White House

Refactoring Functional Programs

"A difference between classic OO approach and a language based approach...: With OO, you model your problem as a collection of interacting thingies. While [with the language based approach] you define a (domain specific) language in which to best express the solution to your problem. You create the language by extending/modifying your language toolkit. Then you solve the problem." --Traditional vs Non-Traditional languages in the real-world