Clojure November 6, 2009
Posted by CK in IT, Software.Tags: Clojure, Jython, Languages, Programming, Python, Scala
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Even before I actually study it in detail, Clojure becomes my latest fixation. A Lisp-based functional, general-purpose language, which produces JVM bytecode and has access to Java libraries? Sounds like a dream come true. I never liked Java, and as a matter of fact, I consider myself a Java-dyslexic. No matter how much I tried in the past, I never got around learning enough of it to use further than “Hello, world”s. Its syntactic resemblance to C, with which I am (was?) quite proficient, didn’t help much. Nevertheless, the breadth and depth of libraries that exist in Java are mind-boggling, and the ability to use them with a different language is just great. I know there are other JVM-based languages, e.g. Scala, but somehow after reading introductory material they never enticed me enough. Also, I really don’t know how come, although a big fan of Python I never tried Jython. I assume I just preferred the real thing — Python also has an extensive and compelling set of libraries.
In any case, I’ll try to get a closer look at Clojure and come back with a more complete opinion.
Python is like cycling May 15, 2008
Posted by CK in IT.Tags: Google Translate, Languages, Python
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So I’m here in Dortmund for the third day now, and I can tell you that if I didn’t have the help from my local colleagues, it would be totally impossible to get by without speaking German — at least for this first batch of paperwork and house hunting. In the process of looking for a flat to rent, I have been searching in newspapers and web sites, all of which are in German. How to deal with that?
Enters Google Translate. Very efficient and quite correct, as it turns out. But then again, opening a browser and clicking on a bookmark etc all the time is a bit of a hassle.
Enters Python 
My bias towards this language is well known to those who have been working with me in the recent years. I haven’t really written any real code for a long time now, more than 4 years actually, but in less than 30 minutes (also putting WebScarab in use, I managed to have a simple but fully functional command-line client for Google Translate in place.
Clearly, Python is like cycling; Once you learn it, you never forget it.
