A nice explanation of conditions in Common Lisp from Manuel Simoni, with example code. This looks like a major improvement on the exception handling in any language I’ve used for anything big. The Axis of Eval: What’s a condition system and why do you want one?.

Comments Off  » Read the rest

Cram is a test framework for command line programs, originally written for mercurial’s test suite. I like the approach – it just reads a shell transcript and runs the commands it finds. If the output doesn’t match, it shows you a diff. It’s kind of like doctest. It looks refreshingly simple to get started with, [...]

Comments Off  » Read the rest

From The Axis of Eval: “Truth IS stranger than fiction”: Chuck McManis explains the cancellation and subsequent fame of Java. It’s fascinating to me how often you hear about these overnight successes that took years to develop and were canceled, given up for dead, etc. many times. I remember hearing similar stories about Self and [...]

1 comment  » Read the rest

I do a quick one-bullet review of Mac SVN clients.

7 comments  » Read the rest

Discussing some quirks of dialog design in iCal’s event edit window.

Comments Off  » Read the rest

Some things I’ve picked up from working with PyObjC recently.

Comments Off  » Read the rest

Some thoughts about making an explicit editing pass on working code:

Once you get a piece of code to the point where you believe it works – it’s passing its tests – go back over it and edit it. That is, go back and edit it for clarity, flow, and style. Just as if it were an essay.

14 comments  » Read the rest

This is a short one, but it might help someone with debugging someday. A while back, we had some code that was checking errno, then using the NSLocalizedString macro to get a localized error message, but it checked errno again later. Only the app isn’t localized yet. There’s no Localizable.strings file, so when NSBundle -localizedStringForKey [...]

2 comments  » Read the rest

I usually like the link selection I get from the Joel Reddit, which usually has good software-related essays at the top. It seems to avoid links to uninformed rants about consumer electronics or industry politics, for which I have no use. I’d like a social links site for software professionals on the Mac – does [...]

9 comments  » Read the rest

I couldn’t make it to WWDC last year, I’m not at Macworld this week, but I will be making it up to LA on the 19th for the Leopard Tech Talk, to catch up. I’ll probably be there the day before, owing to traffic and an inability to wake up early. If any area mac [...]

4 comments  » Read the rest