Elixir Adventures

For my Elixir Language of the Month project, I decided to return to my roots, in a way. You see, once upon a time, I wrote my first program. I had an idea for an space opera RPG, which, in retrospect, was a tacky Star Wars/Final Fantasy hybrid. Still, I wanted to bring that idea to life in any way I could; thus, I spent a good chunk of time my sophomore year of high school spewing out a morass of IFs and GOTOs in BASIC on my trusty TI-83+. Eventually, I did have a working game; it was a short text-based adventure, a sort of "demo" for the full game I had in my head.

Read More...
Posted on 2016-05-23

Max Out Your Programming HP and MP With Elixir

Hello, and welcome back to the language of the month!. For April, I decided to try my hand at a language that's been very popular with the Ruby community, and is causing quite a stir in the Elm community. It's called Elixir!

Read More...
Posted on 2016-05-09

Finding the other end of a pipe on Linux

Have you ever been using the command line and been looking at some colored output, only to lose the coloration when you pipe the output to another command? I often see this with ack something | less -R; you can force coloration with ack --color or use ack's --pager option, but I've often thought to myself "what if it were possible for a program to detect if the other side of the pipe were capable of handling colored output?". Wouldn't it be cool if ack could somehow discover that less -R was on the other side and automatically enable color?

Read More...
Posted on 2016-05-07

Too Many Maybes

I hang out in the Elm Slack channel from time to time, and people will often show up asking for help on their applications, ranging from questions about Elm's syntax to overall application design. One question that comes up pretty often is the right way to reduce the complexity of code like this:

Read More...
Posted on 2016-04-15

Game of Life

In my previous post, I covered my adventures with a Lisp formerly known as DrScheme (Racket). Since Lisp has so much cred in the hacker community, I figured I would pick an equally credentialed problem for my Lisp program: Conway's Game of Life!

Read More...
Posted on 2016-04-13