JaeWeb

kaya, cantr, and learning how to program

October 11th, 2006

On Friday morning I saw a link to the intruiging but utterly useless Whitespace programming language, which in turn refers to the language in development Kaya. Kaya looks pretty cool. It’s based on Haskell, which I don’t really know, and thus not object-oriented but functional language. They call it a scripting language, but it’s really more a general programming language, I think. It has many features geared towards server-side web development and it has nice quirky features I didn’t know before. It is a clear attempt to keep the language simple but take good things from many languages. The community on the mailinglist is also very friendly.

But then, I spent hours and hours - well, doing other stuff in between - trying to get the Kaya compiler to compile and run. I missed all major libraries it uses - probably a sign of how outdated our Cantr II server is, which is a bit of a worry. Eventually it worked (this RPM search engine was invaluable), but then I get compiler errors on the most basic tutorial examples. And the documentation, except for one non-exhaustive tutorial, is practically non-existant. So it’s both cool to see a language in it’s very early yet promising stage of development, but it’s also clearly risky to use it on a bigger scale.

Then Monday and Tuesday this week were almost entirely spent on server management. For unknown reasons, the server had rebooted on Monday morning, and we had the wrong mysql server version in the boot script, resulting in all kinds of SQL errors about corrupted and missing data. It took hours before we figured out what happened and then quite some time to get it all back up and running. And from out of shock we finally set up proper automatic daily backups for the database … which I see now didn’t actually work.

I really want to make it a project to simplify things in the next few months. Clean up the server and remove obsolete stuff; clean up the Cantr organisation and remove unnecessary elements; clean up the Cantr game design and remove unnecessary features.

I just read an interesting blog with an interview of some of the most prominent programmers, including the designers of C++, Linux, Ruby, Python, etc. Very interesting. Especially the sections on what books they recommend. Linus Torvalds and Bjarne Stroustrup both recommend Kernighan & Ritchie, The C Programming Language. Linus goes on recommending Patterson & Hennessy, Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach and Crawford & Gelsinger, Programming the 80386. David Heinemeier Hansson recommends Beck & Andres, Extreme Programming Explained and Peter Norvig suggests Abelson & Sussman, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. Finally, both James Gosling and Tim Bray suggest Programming Pearls by Jon Bentley.

Through this interview I also just found the Dojo Toolkit which is somewhat similar to Google’s Web Toolkit, but both more advanced and in a more premature state (that is, some of the examples don’t seem to work on my computer). Interesting drag-n-drop features.

Note to myself: I really need to figure out what Ruby on Rails is all about …

Entry Filed under: cantr ii, programming languages, kaya, server, programming