The best things and stuff of 2011
Great things and people that I discovered, learned, read, met, etc. in 2011. No particular ordering is implied. Not everything is new.
Great blog posts read
Xv6: Unix v6 Ported to ANSI C, x86 — in fact, the OS Blog is one of my favorite new blogs.
Category theory for the Java programmer — a fairly nice take on the subject.
A brief overview of the Clojure web stack — my notes taken at the time are prefaced with WJW.
To Dissect a Mockingbird: A Graphical Notation for the Lambda Calculus with Animated Reduction — I came to this post ~10 years late, but boy was it worth the wait.
Itsy-OS Kernel: Preemptive Switcher & Memory Manager — I am a complete sucker for this kind of post. I played with the idea of an OSDev blog like no other, but never got past the outline stage… one day.
Monads are not metaphors — Daniel with the 1,000,000th post on monads actually covers fresh ground!
Minimally awesome TODOs — a 2010 post that I didn’t read until much later. Lifehack posts tend to bore me, but this one is oddly compelling
My Keyboard — I love fanatics.
A World in a Ref — Christophe never fails to make me think and this post is no exception. This time he tackles the problem of STM refs containing uber-structures.
The future of programming — yes yes, a thousand times yes!
Most viewed blog posts by me
10 Technical Papers Every Programmer Should Read (At Least Twice) — 25% of the total hits for my site were on this post. I had to buy extra bandwidth from my provider… 3 times.
Favorite technical books discovered (and read)
Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns by Beck — Where the GoF patterns book strives to add features to stunted languages, Beck effortlessly adds fluency to the super-charged Smalltalk. This book has shook me to the core as much as Thinking Forth last year and provoked all manner of interesting ideas in my bat-addled brain.
Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software by Nygard — Nygard and Russ Olsen are probably the best tech writers writing books right now. This book was an absolute joy to read.
Closure: The Definitive Guide by Bolin and High Performance JavaScript by Zakas — Essential reading for my work with ClojureScript.
Introduction to Functional Programming by Bird and Wadler — A gem of the highest order. Make sure you read the linked edition and not the later ones.
Functional Programming and its Applications: An Advanced Course by Henderson — A hidden gem of the highest order. A book of essays on FP well worth the effort to find an affordable copy.
Learn You a Haskell for Great Good! by Lipovača — The best book on Haskell; by far.
Favorite non-technical books read
Intellectual Impostures by Sokal and Bricmont
Titus Groan by Peake
Sirens of Titan by Vonnegut
You are Not a Gadget by Lanier
Asleep by Yoshimoto
Number of books read
Number of books published
Number of books written
0
Number of papers read
≈ 170
Number of papers read deeply
≈ 20
Favorite musicians discovered
Hobo Cubes, Fleet Foxes, Junip, Pulp, Raphael Toral, Deadmau5
Favorite TV series about zombies
The Walking Dead
Favorite programming languages (or related)
Clojure, ClojureScript, Haskell, Self, Qi, Factor, Datalog, OCaml, Ruby
Programming languages used for projects both professional and not
Clojure, Scala, Java, Python, JavaScript, SQL, Bash, make, Ruby, C, Common Lisp, Scheme, Prolog, Datalog, CoffeeScript, Haskell, OCaml
Favorite papers discovered (and read)
Growing a Syntax by Culpepper, et al.
Hygienic Macros through Explicit Renaming by Clinger
RRB-Trees: Efficient Immutable Vectors by Bagwell and Rompf
cKanren by Alvis, Friedman, and Byrd
An Accidental Simula User by Cardelli
Flapjax: A Programming Language for Ajax Applications by Meyerovich
KLEE: Unassisted and Automatic Generation of High-Coverage Tests for Complex Systems Programs by Cadar, et al.
Still haven’t read…
Snow Crash, Spook Country, A Fire upon the Deep, Ulysses, Programmer avec Scheme, Logic Programming and Databases, Norwegian Wood, The Contortionists Handbook, Usagi Yojimbo
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, my kids, Christopher Houser, Christophe Grand, Rich Hickey, David Nolen, Stuart Halloway, David Liebke, Russ Olsen, Peter Seibel, Sam Aaron, Bob Nystrom, Brenton Ashworth, Anthony Simpson, Daniel Spiewak, Zachary Kim, Steve Yegge, Outlaw Vern, Meikel Brandmeyer, Chas Emerick, Jeremy Ashkenas, Oleg Kiselyov, Mark Tarver, Carin Meyer, Ambrose Bonnaire-Sergeant, Phil Bagwell, Clinton Nixon, Stuart Sierra, MenTaLguY, and Reginald Braithwaite.
Favorite code read
Everything on Wouter van Oortmerssen’s website
Life changing technology
org-mode — I’m really starting to come around.
Plans for 2012
- More Ruby
- Read more fiction
- (at least) one big software project
- More concatenative
- Make my way through the core.logic README
- Pescetarianism (redux)
- Website redux
- readevalprintlove.org
- macronomicon.org
- Super-secret project
- Super-duper-secret project
See you next year.
:F
18 Comments, Comment or Ping
AshleyF
Very nice roundup! Lots of your 2011 stuff I’ll have to add to my 2012 list. +1 for “More concatenative” language study in 2012.
Dec 31st, 2011
Geoff Wozniak
Thanks for all the work on your blog this year. I really appreciate it. I don’t get a lot of time outside of work but I like to spend some of my free time here (and following @fogus on Twitter).
Looking forward to 2012.
Dec 31st, 2011
MonkeyIsNull
How the heck have you never read Snowcrash? Read it before you get too old.
Dec 31st, 2011
H Webb
Can you comment on why the Kindle DX has been a life-changing technology for you? I am thinking about ordering one myself and would be curious to hear your thoughts. Thanks, HW
Dec 31st, 2011
Humza
Thanks for an awesome list. By the way, was it “Plans for 2012” that you meant, not 2011?
Dec 31st, 2011
mahmoudimus
Did you mean to say “Plan for 2012”? :)
Dec 31st, 2011
Philippe Monnet
Great list – thanks for putting it together and sharing it. You made me discover a few great gems.
Dec 31st, 2011
bubba
Cool music discoveries, I love Fleet Foxed and Deadmau5 too. I highly recommend reading Snow Crash next for your fictional reading, it’s a great book.
Dec 31st, 2011
un.passant
Thx for all theses interesting reading suggestions !
I’d love it if you could blog about your org-mode usage : is it related to babel ? If yes, will there be some synergy with marginalia ?
Best Regards (and happy programming year!)
Jan 1st, 2012
fogus
@un.passant
There is not much to say at the moment about my org-mode usage. I’m a rank beginner; but I see the potential and love the possibilities.
Jan 1st, 2012
F_D
You mentioned “Snow Crash” in last year’s “Still Haven’t Read”. I feel compelled to send you my copy (or at least a copy) and yet at the same time had this perverse desire to see it on here for many years to come.
Jan 1st, 2012
Patrick Logan
A draft of Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns is available at http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks/BestSmalltalkPractices/ (I think those of us with a print copy are reluctant to put them on the used market – the used prices is pretty high unless you’re really going to want it.)
I don’t know much about avout, but I abhor the comparison to javaspaces. It’s not at all like javaspaces. But most people have not taken the time to learn about javaspaces, just as I have not taken the time to learn about avout. At this point javaspaces is much better specified than avout.
And I’ve run on too long. Happy New Year.
Jan 2nd, 2012
Patrick Logan
Also, if you like SBPP, you’ll probably like Beck’s articles from The Smalltalk Report. Thankfully some of these are online too: http://www.macqueen.us/stIndex.html (The Smalltalk Report was a fairly pricey print journal at the time.)
http://www.macqueen.us/stIndex.html
Jan 2nd, 2012
Patrick Logan
This is my morning to comment. Looks like Amazon has Kent Beck’s Guide to Better Smalltalk for $10 (third party, fulfillment by Amazon).
http://www.amazon.com/Kent-Becks-Guide-Better-Smalltalk/dp/0521644372
This is his entire collection of The Smalltalk Report articles. At least as good a read as SBPP.
Jan 2nd, 2012
Adrian Mouat
Interesting to see the fiction mentions.
It’s your fault I’m now reading House of Leaves after the quote in The Joy of Clojure. It’s already becoming a time sink and mildly freaking me out :)
I just finished The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell, which I would heartily recommend, as well as Cloud Atlas (although it wouldn’t surprise me if you’d read these already).
Jan 6th, 2012
Rafael
Fogus, could you tell us why you recommend the first edition of Bird & Wadler’s book, which uses Miranda, instead of the second, which uses Haskell? Somebody on Stackoverflow (see the link) recommended the second, so I was wondering…
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3993730/should-i-read-the-first-or-second-edition-of-introduction-to-functional-program
Sep 28th, 2012
fogus
@Rafael
The only reason that I recommend the 1st edition is that it’s the only version I’ve read so far. It was fantastic so I’ve not had a driving urge to read the 2nd edition yet.
Oct 9th, 2012
Rafael
Thank you.
Oct 31st, 2012
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