W.G. Sebald

W. G. Sebald killed in a car crash in East Anglia.

Fourth ICFP programming contest

The results of the Fourth ICFP programming contest are out. The Dylan Hackers came second, mostly using Gwyddion Dylan, which the website says is still developmental. The write-up of the contest entry says that:

A major design goal of Dylan is to produce a language in which complex programs can be rapidly prototyped in the same way as with dynamically-typed languages such as Smalltalk or Lisp or "scripting" languages, while at the same time enabling performance comparable to statically typed languages such as C or ML.

Bruce Eckel not impressed by Ruby

Bruce Eckel is not impressed by Ruby. I've tinkered with Ruby and I like the object-oriented design but there are two reasons why I don't see myself doing much with it. First, it's not as concise as Perl for writing small scripts. Second, and more significantly, there are no Ruby libraries that make it worth my while learning it. By contrast, there are at least two Python molecular modelling projects, Pmv and MMTK, both of which are fairly mature and featureful. Even if I didn't care about Python having a cleaner design than Perl, these two libraries would be a compelling reason to learn it.

A New Kind of Science

New Scientist has an interview with Stephen Wolfram about his new book. He may or may not be "the Isaac Newton of the 21st century" but the book sounds interesting. This kind of simulation is going to be hugely important in bioinformatics.

I've been trying to get my head around Mark De Pristo's notes on bioinformatics programming in Scheme. Someday I'd like to work my way through Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs.

The Navajo Know

s.c.i.'s infiltration of the Irish Times letters page continues with a letter from Julian West in response to John Water's column on road deaths. Tuesday's page had a letter from Kate Hagerty correcting an error in the opening lines of Kevin Myers's column.

Life's Grand Design

Life's Grand Design is a Technology Review article by Kenneth R. Miller on the flaws in Intelligent Design.

A Designer Universe?

Steven Weinberg pours cold water on the notion of A Designer Universe?

Pioneers of the Fortran Programming Language

O'Reilly jump on the bioinformatics bandwagon.

Humbled by the Genome's Mysteries

Stephen Jay Gould is Humbled by the Genome's Mysteries.

Free Software as appropriate technology

Danny Yee: Free Software as appropriate technology.

Malignant Sadness

Guardian review of Lewis Wolpert's book Malignant Sadness: The Anatomy of Depression.

Edward Said

"I was drawn to figures such as Conrad, a man of two or three traditions, and to men like Vico and Swift who made a conscious effort to appropriate the world to themselves," he said. With Giambatista Vico, the 18th-century historian, "it was the notion that people make their own worlds; you don't feel that your nation is the heart of anything but the individual is, and it is the individual that makes history. Vico was an outsider too, a Neapolitan: you might say he was an Italian Arab." - Edward Said

Zadie Smith wins the Whitbread first novel prize.