ro: Mom, I want us to grow pumpkins in the back yard

m: OK.

ro: Can we please grow them tomorrow..please

m: Pumpkins tomorrow. No, sweet heart it cant be done that fast. Anyway, why do you want to grow pumpkins.

ro: I want to grow them and have lots of them before Halloween

m: Halloween?

ro: Yes mom, so I can sell the pumpkins and make money to buy toys for Christmas

Happy Birthday Son!

From uncle bob :

One of the developers asked the question point blank:

“What do you do when your managers tell you to make a mess?”

I responded:

“You don’t take it. Behave like a doctor who’s hospital administrator has just told him that hand-washing is too expensive, and he should stop doing it.”

If it werent for all the marketing and hype surrounding Java, Smalltalk would be the lingua franca for OOP enterprise-wide. Well, it seemed like with Ruby on Rails picking up steam few years ago, Smalltalk came back into limelight- when one of the Ruby developers, Avi Bryant, moved to using Smalltalk to build Seaside - a stateful web runtime. Fast forward to current, this OOP (2008) challenge was won by Smalltalk developer. Go read it here..

On a related note, my son Jay is starting his bot building using Smalltalk IDE/runtime - SQUEAK..Its a blast of a teaching and learning tool. I will post few of his projects when he gets to level0.

Simon Peyton Jones of Haskell fame (and a MSoftie) turned 50 today!

Happy Birthday Simon! Your talk at OSCON 2007 inspired me to take a detour with Haskell…

Check the Tiobe index out for the latest news…

Finally, I have started working on SICP exercises little by little. I am using Emacs and Edwin to write both LISP and Scheme variants of the solution. It was very frustrating to get started and find the right IDE/Language etc. After playing with MzScheme adn DrScheme, I got down and started using Emacs and Edwin.

I am excited about the prospects of expanding my mind and coding prowess - thinking in general. When I feel down, I read this, this and this for motivation. You might have noticed some solutions posted already..I will be s  l o w l y working thru’ Chapter 1.

Pascal’s triangle-

(define (pascal depth elem)
   (cond
     ((= depth 0) 0)
     ((= depth 1) 1)
    (else
      (cond ((= elem 1) 1)
         ((= elem depth) 1)
      (else (+ (pascal (- depth 1) elem) (pascal (- depth 1) (- elem 1))))
  )
 )
 )
)

(define (f n)
  (cond
   ((= n 0) 0)
   ((= n 1) 1)
   ((= n 2) 2)
  (else (+ (f (- n 1)) (* 2 (f (- n 2))) (* 3 (f (- n 3)))))
 )
)
(f 2)

(define (f n)
  (define (f-iter a b c count)
  (cond
   ((= n 0) 0)
    ((= n 1) 1)
    ((= n 2) 2)
    ((= count 3) (+ a (* 2 b) (* 3 c)))
   (else (f-iter (+ a (* 2 b) (* 3 c)) a b (- count 1)))
   )
  )
  (f-iter 2 1 0 n)
)
(f 5)