Thursday, January 29, 2009

Today I gave a 5 minute talk about John W. Backus in the Graduate Seminar class. It was fun to talk about all the ways Mr. Backus failed before he succeeded. It's a great reminder to not give up on your ideas, because eventually you can get it right.

No offense to Mr. Backus intended, of course.

Wednesday, January 7, 2009

"(And in retrospect we may observe that many of the problems multiprogramming has posed in the past are nothing else but the consequence of a prior tendency to attach undue significance to determinacy.) Eventually I came to regard nondeterminacy as the normal situation, determinacy being reduced to a - not even very interesting - special case." - Edsger W. Dijkstra, "A Discipline of Programming", pp. xv

Oh snap!

Sunday, December 21, 2008

I released a tarball of the Rails on Rules code, it's 18 months old and I'm not working on it, but I found motivation to ship out the code anyway. No guarantees if it still works, I didn't test it before rolling the tarball, I just added the BSD license to the code.

I've also uploaded the project to GitHub.

Tuesday, June 19, 2007

I have made quite a bit of progress on the Rails on Rules system, and have been posting updates on that page explaining what's going on, and providing more background material.

Monday, June 4, 2007

I spent part of my week off in February learning Rails. As I wrote on my personal weblog, I think Rails could use a lot of improvement, especially in the View layer.

Every time I evaluate a web framework, in the back of my mind I always compare it to the fantastic experience I had with WebObjects' rules-based development system, Direct To Web. Honestly, the experience spoiled me rotten - I don't know if I'll ever be able to truly enjoy web development without a rule engine.

So, I'm making one, for Rails. Not because I love Rails, because I love Rails' attitude and I think Rails developers will get it.

Read more about it: Rails on Rules

Monday, April 9, 2007

Frontier is Very Interesting

Friday, April 6, 2007

Hello, World!