The best things in 2010
Great things and people that I discovered, learned, read, met, etc. in 2010. No particular ordering is implied. Not everything is new.
Great blog posts read
Understanding Pac-man Ghost Behavior
Clojure Unsupervised Part-Of-Speech Tagger Explained
Reading Code is Good, Writing Documentation is Better
Herbert Stoyan’s Lisp collection at CHM
Federer as Religious Experience
The Original Dungeons and Dragons
Manly Slang from the 19th Century
Most viewed blog posts by me
Favorite technical books discovered (and read)
A Programming Language by Iverson
Transaction Processing by Gray
Thinking Forth by Brodie
Land of Lisp by Barski M.D.
Elegant Ruby by Olsen
Favorite non-technical books read
Breakfast of Champions
Perdido Street Station
In the Country of Last Things
Go for Beginners
Kafka on the Shore
Number of books read
77
Number of books written
Number of papers read
≈ 150
Number of papers read deeply
≈ 40
Favorite musicians discovered
Pantha du Prince
Oneohtrix Point Never
Sun Ra
Andrew Thomas
Scientist
Favorite Albums Released in 2010
Andrew Thomas – Between Buildings And Trees
Pantha du Prince – Black Noise
Demdike Stare – Liberation Through Hearing
Favorite TV series about zombies
The Walking Dead
Favorite programming languages (or related)
Clojure, Haskell, Io, Qi, Coffeescript, Lombok, Datalog
Programming languages used for projects both professional and not
Clojure, Scala, Java, Python, Javascript, SQL, Bash, make, Ruby, C, C++, Potion, CLIPS, Ix, Common Lisp, Scheme, Prolog, Datalog
Favorite papers discovered (and read)
Soft Stratification for Transformation-Based Approaches to Deductive Databases by Andreas Behrend
The Semantic Elegance of Applicative Languages by D.A. Turner
Practical Predicate Dispatch by Todd Millstein
The Design and Implementation of Typed Scheme by Sam Tobin-Hochstadt and Matthias Felleisen
Extending the Scope of Syntactic Abstraction by Waddell and Dybvig
ORBIT: An Optimizing Compiler For Scheme by David Kranz
Still haven’t read…
Lisp in Small Pieces, Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming, Snow Crash, Spook Country, A Fire upon the Deep, Ulysses, Programmer avec Scheme, The Sirens of Titan, Manufacturing Consent
Best conference attended
People met, read, worked with, followed, and/or corresponded with whom motivated and/or influenced me greatly and always made me think
My wife, Christopher Houser, George Jahad, Christophe Grand, Rich Hickey, Stuart Halloway, David Liebke, Zach Beane, Russ Olsen, Peter Seibel, Jeffrey Straszheim, Brenton Ashworth, Anthony Simpson, Zachary Kim, Stanislav Datskovskiy, James Iry, Steve Yegge, Outlaw Vern, Yukihiro Matsumoto, Meikel Brandmeyer, Nurullah Akkaya, Chas Emerick, Ranier Joswig, Steve Jenson, Lau Jensen, Erik Naggum, Oleg Kiselyov, Christian Neukirchen, Shiro Kawai, Kazimir Majorinc, Steve Webster, Mark Tarver, Manuel Simoni, Paul Snively, and Jürgen Hötzel.
Favorite code read
html.clj in Marginalia by Zachary Kim
horizon.clj by Kevin Downey (aka. hiredman)
tailopt.js by Guillaume Lathoud
Baysick with continuations by Daniel Spiewak
Wood and Stones by Reginald Braithwaite
Life changing technology
Kindle 3
Plans for 2011
- More Haskell
- Read more papers
- Read more fiction
- Release more open source code1
- Empty the “Still haven’t read…” list
- Noodle through another book2
- Pescetarianism
- More hammock time
See you next year.
:F
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One side-effect of the book is that I have not had time to bake the other half of many private projects. It’ll be nice to actually have some time to work on code and push it out into the wild… instead of just writing about it. ↩
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Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that’s where it should stay. — Christopher Hitchens ↩
10 Comments, Comment or Ping
Phil
Surely not! If you don’t conj more stuff on to the list during 2011 then something is wrong. =)
Dec 30th, 2010
Sean Corfield
Ah, I remember reading Iverson’s book! It inspired me to write an APL interpreter for my final year BSc Comp Sci project (in Pascal) – and that experience inspired me to take on a PhD focused on functional programming language design and implementation in the early/mid 80’s!
Dec 30th, 2010
F_D
Great list, Mike. And once again you beat the hell out of me on the “books read” list.
So glad you enjoyed “Perdido Street Station” and “Breakfast of Champions”.
Dec 30th, 2010
indy
Really good list. However I think there’s a typo in the technical books section, did you mean Eloquent Ruby rather than Elegant Ruby?
Dec 31st, 2010
Daniel Pritchett
I enjoyed the list and now I have a question. How do you personally access the papers you listed? I am curious about the “applicative languages” one but the ACM portal seems to want to sell it to me. Do you have a subscription or is there another route?
Thanks!
Jan 4th, 2011
fogus
@DPrichett
I do not have a subscription to the ACM. Everything that I read (so far) is freely available via school sites, Citeseer, other. The applicative languages paper is from a book called “Functional Programming and its Applications: An Advanced Course” that I happen to own.
Jan 5th, 2011
fogus
@indy
When I read it (a draft) the title had not yet been changed.
Jan 5th, 2011
Shrutarshi Basu
How do you manage to read 77 books a year? Do you do something like speedreading or do you just spend a lot of time reading? And of course the literary question of our times: ebooks or dead trees?
Jan 7th, 2011
Jeff Rose
Ooooh, Snow Crash and Fire Upon the Deep, you are in for a treat with those. If you haven’t read A Deepness in the Sky, I’d read that before both of them though. It has some of the coolest sci-fi writing about software development in the distant future.
Jan 7th, 2011
Russ Olsen
It’s not exactly a typo – at the point when Fogus read the book it was called Elegant Ruby. Just before it went to press we changed it to Eloquent Ruby. Publishers!
Russ Olsen
Feb 2nd, 2011
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