As I continue to sketch ideas for my dream programming language (if such a thing can even exist), I’ve begun to embrace the idea of “event oriented programming”. Almost everything can be reduced to an event. A simple event can be thought of as a single statement in a linear sequence of statements. In a system without control flow every event is of this type, and each line will be executed in order, performing its intended action.

We know from decades of language development that this is not enough for all but the simplest of programs. The introduction of a ‘jump’ command allowed basic function calls to occur. First you store your location, jump to a different place, then you jump back (which we call ‘return’). Conditional branching, the ‘if/else’ statements, gave even more control over the running of a program. Again, this is really just another flavor of jump, with a test being performed and a jump ignored or taken accordingly.

Without touching the more ‘exotic’ control flows—stately ones such as ‘yield’ and continuations—the next big development (in my view) was the loop. Behind the scenes it’s just another conditional jump, but we begin to see the development of a small lifecycle here. Consider the standard ‘for’ loop:

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So, in case you haven’t noticed, I’m not posting more frequently, I haven’t finished any long books, and my kitchen is too small to cook in.

Sorry? Grab a link to the blog feed and you’ll be the first to know when a post comes out. I’ve been doing a lot more programming and less writing about it lately. Hopefully I’ll be able to post the fruits of my labor soon.

In the weeks since the Japanese earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear crisis, there have been hundreds of numbers dealing with the radiation levels tossed about by the media. Now that matters have somewhat quieted I thought it might be useful to discuss the various units of measure and what they mean.

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As part of a look into JSP and the associated XML configuration files that I recently did, I coded up an interesting tag which I call ReflectiveTag. The goal of the experiment was to use reflection to dynamically load a tag handler to use in executing a tag on a page. As the name suggests, this is accomplished with decidedly un-fancy Java reflection.

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I’ve invented a new little game. I hate it when you are listening to Pandora and it plays a track you already have in your library. So as a way of encouraging myself to make new stations and try new music, whenever this happens I have to stop what I’m doing and find that track in my library and start playing it, and try to cue the two of them up together. In the process you get to play around with different displacements and get new weird self-remixes. It’s kinda fun, but still a penalty because you have to stop what you’re doing.