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The best things and stuff of 2012

Dec 26, 2012

Great things and people that I discovered, learned, read, met, etc. in 2012. No particular ordering is implied. Not everything is new.

hacker news discussion

also: see the lists from 2011 and 2010

Great blog posts read

• A short lesson in perspective — easily the best post of 2012 in my mind.

• Exponential decay of history — very interesting ideas in cache invalidation

• Why not events — much of this struck home as I read this during a time when I was discovering these lessons the hard way

• The nine circles of Hell, as depicted in Lego — My favorite Lego project of the year

• microjs — I really admire the intent here and I’d love to see the same effort for other languages

• Lang.Next 2012 video archive — much wisdom here

• The personal analytics of my life — Wolfram’s dogged drive to collect data on his life, day in, day out, over the course of decades.

• Juergen Schmidhuber’s home page — a panoply of amazing things

• A Yesod tutorial — I had great plans to create something with this post as a basis, but alas… still a great post though.

• Relational shell programming — a very nice introduction to relational algebra by Matt Might using bash, cat, sed, etc…

• APL is more French than English — I had never read this before this year and loved it.

• How to Host a Dungeon — A highly addictive game that I found this year.

• Joyce’s Ulysses – complete audio — nuff said

• Engelbart’s Violin — A beautiful post about keyboards and chording and enhancing the human potential.

Most viewed blog posts by me

1. 10 Technical Papers Every Programmer Should Read (At Least Twice) — My most popular post of 2011 was also my most popular of 2012 — go figure.

2. Lisp in 40 32 29 lines of Ruby

3. A functional programming influence graph

4. Not enough

5. My Clojure compilation series

6. Our industry needs more…

Favorite technical books discovered (and read)

• Warren’s Abstract Machine: a tutorial reconstruction by Hassan Aït-Kaci — I’ll need to go through this a few more times to truly get it, but it’s clear that it’s something special.

• Real World Haskell by Bryan O’Sullivan, Don Stewart, and John Goerzen — I’m not sure why I waited so long to read this, but I’m thankful that I finally did.

• The Recursive Universe: Cosmic Complexity and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge by William Poundstone — A beautiful book about cellular automata that I learned of via the inimitable Reginald Braithwaite.

• Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing by Thierry Bardini — a wonderful book about one of the true pioneers of computing, his philosophy and his dismissal that I found via Stanislav Datskovskiy.

• Mindstorms: Children, Computers, And Powerful Ideas by Seymour Papert — I’ve read bits and pieces of Papert’s works, but I finally had the pleasure to read his most famous work.

• Electronic Music Review — a long dead journal, but still a compelling read.

Favorite non-technical books read

• Borges: A Life by Edwin Williamson — an account of the life of one of my favorite authors who was less messed up than I thought.

• In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin — I’ve wanted to read this for years, but could never find an affordable copy. It was well worth the wait.

• The Idiot by Dostoevsky — through some odd confluence of events I’ve never read Dostoevsky, so it was very nice to finally read this tense, yet approachable work.

• Botchan by Natsume Soseki — written in 1906 in Japan this book has a surprisingly modern feel.

• The Machinery of Life by David Goodsell — learned of this through Alan Kay and was blown away by it. Amazing illustrations and understandable explanations are a humbling inspiration for someone who’s tried to teach a technical topic.

• The Purple Cloud by MP Shiel — unbelievably dark

• The Star Rover by Jack London — in American high schools many kids are made to read London’s Call of the Wild. A truly progressive school would assign this gem.

• The Rings of Saturn by Sebald — falls right in the vein of House of Leaves, Kafka, Ovid and the works of Borges.

Number of books read

a bunch

Number of books published

0

Number of books written

⅛ + ¼

Number of papers read

≈ 30

Number of papers read deeply

7

Language zoo additions

A scheme, a datalog, a Meta II, an Ur-Lisp

Favorite musicians discovered

Rishloo, Anika, Delia Derbyshire, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Stereolab, Ghost, Klaus Nomi, Television Sky, Silver Apples, Belong

Favorite TV series about zombies

The Walking Dead

Favorite programming languages (or related)

Clojure, ClojureScript, Haskell, Datalog, Ruby, Shen, JavaScript, Frink, Pure, Racket

Programming languages used for projects both professional and not

Clojure, Haskell, Java, Python, JavaScript, SQL, Bash, make, Ruby, C, Prolog, Datalog

Favorite papers discovered (and read)

• META II: A syntax-oriented compiler writing language by Val Schorre

• Behavioral Software Contracts by Robby Findler

• L – A Common Lisp for Embedded Systems by Rodney Brooks and Charles Rosenberg

• Reasonable Lisp by Christian Queinnec (via @bigthingist)

Still haven’t read…

Snow Crash, Spook Country, A Fire upon the Deep, Ulysses, Programmer avec Scheme, Norwegian Wood, The Contortionists Handbook, Usagi Yojimbo and a boat-load of scifi

Best conference attended

Strange Loop

People met, read, worked with, followed, and/or corresponded with whom motivated and/or influenced me greatly and always made me think

My wife, my kids, Chris Houser, Rich Hickey, David Nolen, Stuart Halloway, Russ Olsen, Peter Seibel, Sam Aaron, Brenton Ashworth, Craig Andera, Brian McKenna, Outlaw Vern, Jim Weirich, Jeremy Ashkenas, Oleg Kiselyov, Dave Herman, Mahmud, Carin Meier, Ambrose Bonnaire-Sergeant, Phil Bagwell, and Reginald Braithwaite.

Favorite code read

• Long Nguyen’s META II
• Datomic (when I had access)
• Chouser’s JaM
• Contiki OS
• Optima
• Write Yourself a Scheme in 48 Hours

Life changing technology discovered

• org-mode babel

State of plans from 2011

• More Ruby — I pulled this off while working at Relevance but have scaled back since leaving. I do miss it from time to time.

• Read more fiction — underway

• (at least) one big software project — not a big one, although I have the seeds of a big one in place.¹

• More concatenative — huge fail

• Make my way through the core.logic README — My trip through the README turned into an enormous yak shave. However, I think the core.logic plan was satisfied in other ways.

• Pescetarianism (redux) — huge fail (again)

• Website redux — partial success

• macronomicon.org — on hold

• Super-secret project — the aforementioned seeds

• Super-duper-secret project — this was in reference to Datomic

Plans for 2012

• Ariadne (the super-secret project)
• More concatenative
• Participate in the PLT Games
• No talks unless I have code to show

See you next year.

:F