I've seen this before many times. 99% of the time, your program probably can rely on a badly implemented reference count GC. But there's this one percent of the time where you need to pierce through all of the layers of abstraction and really grasp what's going on. This is why computer science programs that teach Java will always be inferior to programs that force students to program some level of assembler and C.
I worked for a company that NEEDED to integrate with Excel. We always joked that the two people who knew the deep and nasty details of Excel weren't allowed to be on the same aircraft. (They both left the company within a year or two of each other, thus proving the importance of watching one's truck count. But that's another story)
I'm not done yet... so my benchmark that used to take 7.3 seconds now takes 5.2 seconds (so, only 40% faster,
but that does include the time spent loading all of the libraries) but I'm part way through removing all of
the REXML out of my formatting code in Rm and replacing it with
Ruby-XML-Smart.
I've always felt that a good language is one that lets you implement features of other languages. And apparently you can hack Monads into Ruby. How cool.
I've always felt that a good language is one that lets you implement features of other languages. And apparently you can hack Monads into Ruby. How cool.
Every time I hear about an RDF-based web idea, I always check it out to see if it makes intuitive sense to a casual observer. And, so far, I haven't found any. The problem is that RDF is this huge abstract thing, and there's a lot of AI resear...ehrm.... semantic web work associated with it....
I'm not entirely sure if it was a waking dream, a real genuine earthquake (I checked quake.usgs.org and didn't see anything) or somebody clomping around and causing the floor to shake, but thought I felt an earthquake the other day while sitting in bed trying to sleep. And I realized that I wasn't dogfooding Photohub nor using it to manage my photos. Which means that I'm not making backup disks of my photos, which is bad given that I've always been a little suspicious about the chances of a desktop hard drive surviving a good earthquake.
But, the way I see it, a base API doesn't need to be easy to deal with. It doesn't need to be simple. It just needs to be simple enough to gather a small bunch of users who can shake out a good wrapper from various repeated pieces of code and flexible enough that they can actually write something....
Copyright 2007, Ken Wronkiewicz