JavaScript is a fascinating language. Not entirely by its virtues as a programming language, but mainly by its integration with web browsers. It seems to be an accident of fate that the keys to the kingdom fell into the lap of this little language, but it is extremely heartening to see the Mozilla developers push the little language that could up the hill of respectability. Hey, if we’re all going to have to use one language, it may as well be a good one. I am referring to the vaguely recent release of JavaScript 1.7 as featured in FireFox 2.0. I encourage all developers, who haven’t already, to take a look at the list of what’s new. Some really fantastic stuff there, and if you build your own SpiderMonkey you can run a program like this (with the switch -v 170),
from the command line and get the expected output of
Michael Mann's "Heat" is pretty good
Wes Anderson's "Bottle Rocket" is pretty good
Robert Rodriguez's "Desperado" is pretty good
Nothing substantive here, but just a hearty congratulations to the Mozilla devs who worked on this.
Anthony JavaScript, Programming, Software Releases
I wrote up a quick example of writing a unit test for Ruby code that writes output to stdout (usually the console / command line). Here is a description of the example, and here is the example itself (explanation in the next post).
Anthony Programming, Software Releases
I’ve released binaries and code for RubyImporter 0.2.1 due to some feedback that it was using too much memory. I’ve been running the thing for a year or so now, but the most likely time for memory to be a problem is when first indexing. At this point, I find that I can re-index all the Ruby files in my home directory
mdimport -r ~/Library/Spotlight/RubyImporter.mdimporter ~/
pretty quickly and without using much RAM. For Intel Mac users out there, I have had feedback that the Universal Binary works, so if you had a problem with an Intel Mac before, feel free to give it another go.
Anthony Software Releases
GG to me for being horrible at managing multiple email accounts. I happened to type something into Spotlight tonight in the off chance I had already coded up a version and, lo and behold, it gave me a Ruby source file thanks to a comment annotating the code in question. This reminded me that I hadn’t released an updated RubyImporter Spotlight plug-in since… well… ever. So now that’s done, I hope others get some use out of the software.
Anthony Software Releases
