Tagged: ruby

San Diego this week


A lot of things are going on:

* [[http://www.rubyconf.org/|RubyConf]]
* [[http://osdw.org/|Open Source Desktop Workshop]]
* This is not in San Diego, but there’s a **free** concert by Indian Ocean up in LA

Unfortunately, all of these things cost too much for me to get into :( Besides, I have a paper deadline on 17th so can’t take that liberty.

While I’m on events, let me take this chance to mention [[http://upcoming.org|Upcoming]] and [[http://eventful.com|Eventful]] — two new additions to the “social” apps bandwagon — these are event calendars. Upcoming was recently acquired by Yahoo, and there’s a lot of momentum behind Eventful (EVDB) too.

I’m a linguist (again!)


The last time I was on a language learning spree was back at [[http://www.iitk.ac.in|IIT Kanpur]]. We had this course in our 3rd year, called Programming Languages, Tools and Techniques. It was like a crash course whirl-wind tour of a myriad of, well, programming languages, tools and techniques — Perl scripting, CGI, shell scripting, decoding ELF files, latex etc etc.

Somehow things worked themselves in such a way that this quarter I got to lay my hands on two entirely new and really funky languages — [[http://python.org|Python]] and [[http://rubycentral.com|Ruby]]. Though Python is not as funky as Ruby, I really love it. Ruby is darn cool! And I think I will have occasion to visit our old friend Perl.

I found some great links on scripting languages:

* [[http://home.pacbell.net/ouster/scripting.html|John Ousterhout on Scripting Languages]]
* [[http://www.ifi.uio.no/in228/lecsplit/|Notes on problem solving using high level scripting languages by Hans Petter Langtangen]]