In spite of the early snowstorm at the end of October, it’s actually been a very warm winter here in New York so far. Feels a lot like winter on the west coast, except warmer. On the bright side, the days are starting to get longer, albeit very slowly.
Here is the view from lower Manhattan on a gray, blustery morning.
It’s no big secret that air travel in general has become a lot less fun than it used to be. Shrinking seats, escalating fees, and of course the ever-increasing list of ‘security’ procedures foisted upon us by the good folks of the TSA and the Department of Hopeless Stupidity.
The whole situation seems to have disintegrated long past the point of parody, with disabled toddlers being groped by TSA agents and holiday cupcakes being confiscated as contraband, but there we are.
strlang – a simple language for string manipulation
strlang is a programming language I created with the goal of making string manipulation simple and straightforward. It is an imperative language with a minimalist syntax. The language and its compiler were written as part of the Programming Languages and Translators (COMS 4115) course at Columbia University in Fall 2011.
Features
This photo is from last year, descending White Mountain Peak in eastern California in the middle of October. Meanwhile it’s 50 degrees and sunny outside my window here in New York in mid-December.
One of the benefits of being on the east coast is that we do have four full seasons. Of course as my photo suggests, you can have seasons in California too. You just may need to drive to a different part of the state to see them.
Prologue
Like many folks who began using Java around ten years ago, I found it very useful with two exceptions: it forced you to use objects for everything, and it was slow.
Since then, nothing much has changed about the object-oriented nature of Java, although some of the more annoying limitations of the early days have been more or less dealt with.