I’ve really neglected iDrone, recently. Well, we all have. John and I have been busy with work, and Matt has been busy designing standards for storage cryptography. In fact, Matt is now the acting chair of IEEE’s Security in Storage Workgroup (SISWG). Very cool. The newest member of our tech-blogging group, Ryan has basically been keeping the blog alive on his own.

Considering how much I’ve been thinking about coding during the break, and how much less interested the average reader of this blog is in that sort of thing, I really should have made my last post about learning Ruby over there. From here on out, I’m really going to try to make my purely technical posts over there, as opposed to on this blog. Today’s post was also related to Ruby.

A lot of people, most of my former bosses included, unfortunately, believe that high-level programming languages are pretty much all equally powerful. It just isn’t true, though. Some are far more expressive than others. For example, some constructs can’t be expressed at all in languages such as Java or VB, short of writing a huge and labored program to create the functionality missing in the language. One example is a function that returns functions that increment things. It would be a nightmarish task to write a Java program to do it, but it only takes three lines in Ruby.

def acc(n)
   lambda {|i| n += i}
end

iDrone: Writing an accumulator generating function in Ruby

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 20th, 2007 at 6:27 pm and is filed under Geekery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.