I’m extremely tired tonight. I am going to mention a few tidbits that I discovered today and then call it a night. I discovered that the Julia programming language had evolved a good bit since I last looked at it. I started reading a tutorial on it and took a quick look at the manual.
Second, I discover the Pony language. I am still investigating what it is but on the surface it appears to be a very pragmatic functional language based on the actor-model paradigm. I’m still getting my head around what that means. It will probably be good for a blog or two when I start to understand it.
I did have a mini-epiphany while I was writing my journal entry this morning. It occurred to me that I didn’t actually need to shuffle the number cards in the Countdown numbers implementation. It is sufficient to pick them randomly and make sure that I don’t pick the same card twice. I figured out that this was a case where modeling the mechanisms that we use to try to insure arbitrariness in our distribution of cards in the real world, i.e. shuffling, was totally extraneous if I was depending on the arbitrariness of a pseudo-random number generator for that in the first place.
I know. I’m tired. I hope that last paragraph made sense. Hopefully I won’t be quite so tired when I write my blog tomorrow.
Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.