The results are interesting, to say the least.

Erlang, my flavour of the month, predictably ranks top on both ‘This language is good for distributed computing’ and ‘This language excels at concurrency’. So far so good. At the time of writing, the number #1 most dissimilar to is PHP.

Scala, my other flavour of the month, gets glowing marks on reusable code, and a lovely type system. Surprise surprise, #1 dissimilarity is PHP again.

PHP, the bane of my life, is on top in the lolz-o-meter. Its highest score is ‘I am sometimes embarrassed to admit to my peers that I know this language’. Wow. #4 is ‘The thought that I may be using this language in twenty years time fills me with dead’. I hear that. The ‘Most Similar’ rating include Visual Basic and Cobol – both regularly derided for being made of suck.

So, by the results, people seem to hate PHP – but this is at odds with it being absolutely everywhere. You can’t escape PHP when doing web stuff, as most affordable hosting companies offer it and nothing else. Why aren’t there more options for non-PHP servers, when it’s so widely disliked? And how do we convince hosting companies to provide us with something better, and clients to want their projects written in something better?

Place your cursor upon the planchette, hold down the cursor, and ask the spirits a question.

This project was written in Flash, using the Flex framework (the framework of the restless dead!), and is powered entirely by ectoplasm and occult magics.

Please note that I take no responsibility for hauntings, possession, poltergeist activity, nightmares or curses that may result through the use of this program – it’s all at your own risk.

Happy Halloween!

USE THE BOARD.

So, I needed a project to cut my teeth in, something simple, with nice, clear end goals. So I ported my Siege Unit Converter, a program I wrote ages ago to convert obscure MUT files into simple BMP files. Now, this wasn’t the ideal use-case for Erlang (converting images from one format to another is something that’s quite suited to imperative step-by-step code), but it’s a small project that doesn’t need anything especially complex from a language, so it was perfect for testing my Erlang skills.

Wow. I went down from 566 lines of code to 135 (inclusive of comments, according to the Unix wc), and the majority of them are for producing error messages (the average Erlang program wouldn’t need to, as it’d allow the process to crash and get another process to handle the error, for nice, clean code).

Look at this from the C++ version. I admit, I wrote it a while ago, and probably isn’t the best. It’s for converting the Siege palette file into something the BMP can read.


for(int i = 0; i < 256; ++i)
{
    bmpFile.Write(palette[(i*3)+2]); //Red //Colours are stored as BGR in Siege's palette - backwards again
    bmpFile.Write(palette[(i*3)+1]); //Green
    bmpFile.Write(palette[(i*3)]); //Blue
    bmpFile.Write(0); //Unused - bitmaps pad the alpha channel to keep things in a nice DWORD size
}


Now look at the Erlang for the same function.


parse_palette_group(Palette_out, <<>>) ->
    reverse(Palette_out);
parse_palette_group(Palette_out, <>) ->
    parse_palette_group(<<0, B, G, R, Palette_out/binary>>, Rest).


Erlang's code cuts out all of the horrid trying-to-work-out-the-position code, and just happily builds the data structure. Amazing.

Now, the one issue I've had is due to the sequential nature of the source program - Erlang doesn't support this well, as each IF-stye block (Case, in Erlang's case) had to be a nested level - for neatness, I had to split the functions into multiple steps. However, I managed to add a function to take a list of files that would happily convert them all - and it only took two lines.

Once I've cut my teeth on some of the networking stuff, I'll be putting together something big, concurrent and awesome with the language. Something with spaceships and shooting, and lots of players.

You can download the code HERE

• When you give a time estimate, you’ll always overrun. By at least a week. And then when you think you’re done, more stuff pops up.
• No matter how much money you put aside, you’re going to go over budget.
• When you start work, you realise just how bad a job the previous maintainers did, and you’re forced to work with the horrible foundations as you don’t have the time or money to refactor their decision of “let’s gloss everything! Three times!”
• You’re going to end up working a lot of late nights, and your partner/project manager (same difference) is going to be pissed at you.
• Your diet changes from being relatively good to being composed entirely of coffee and takeaways.
• You forget what a social life is. Or what sleep is.
• It’s all worth it in the end.

Anyways, now that I’m getting settled, I should get some more actual code up.

Another initiative that has proven to be successful in growing our customer base has been the
introduction of Facebook across our Hobby centres. Traditionally, we have found that most customers
discover the Games Workshop Hobby by word of mouth from friends and family. With Facebook
becoming the new ‘word of mouth’ among many of our customers, individual Facebook accounts are
being rolled out to all 392 Games Workshop Hobby centres across the world. This allows each
manager to keep local hobbyists informed of activities and events, such as new product launches. It
also makes it easier for customers to recommend Games Workshop to friends and family.

Games Workshop have always shied away from new media, but it’s a welcome turn. Add to that their recent global campaign encouraging folks to upload pictures of their armies, and it looks like they’re finally entering the Internet age.

Much to my dismay, Reia has been discontinued, as of last week. Bugger.

Reia brought the styling of Ruby to the Erlang VM, with object-orientation and (horror!) mutable state, as well as much needed modernization of syntax. Although functional programming purists might not want mutable state anywhere near the Erlang ecosystem, I think what Reia was trying to achieve – making it dynamic and a bit more accessible to outsiders to the whole Erlang thing – is an admirable goal.

Tony Arcieri, the language author, states the existence of Elixir, another language with similar goals, as the reason for his abandonment of the language – not feeling that two similar languages could occupy the same niche. I think this is a bad move – Erlang’s a fantastic platform for concurrent code, and anything that makes it easier for people to cross over from the dominant imperative, object-oriented style to a paradigm that can properly take advantage of multi-core hardware is a good thing in my books. As there’s so little in the way of languages targeting the Erlang VM, it’s not like it was a crowded pool.

It’s much like seeing a band you like split up – you know the members are all likely to move on and make new things, but you can’t help but miss that next album they’ll never release.

Here’s to you, Tony Arcieri, for trying something awesome.

What’s this site about? I’m a former coder for Zombie Master, and like to write about coding, especially the realms of obscure languages, and investigating what crazy things we can do with software, and how we can cross code with the most unexpected things.

In the coming weeks, I’ll be putting up more projects, code samples, tutorials, and anything else that crosses my mind. I’ll also be slowly working on a super-secret mega-project, so stay tuned.

On the non-programming front, I’ll be talking about my other passions, such as Warhammer, lapidary, music and art, but I’ll always try to relate it to programming. Probably.

Suggestions? Comments? Things you want me to cover? Contact me and maybe I’ll write an article about it.

More About Me

I started coding in the womb. Possibly. I use Ubuntu, am a big Linux advocate (although only recently, hence some of my older projects being a bit Windows-focused), and I write everything in VIM. IDEs are for wimps.

I know quite a few programming languages, but most only in passing. I’m fascinated by obscure ones, especially Functional ones. You’ll probably see a lot of Javascript (and jQuery) stuff on here, because it’s nice and easy to make something pretty and accessible that you don’t have to download. There might be some Flash stuff, too, but only if HTML5/CSS3 stuff can’t do what I want it to do.

I wrote this theme (but based it on this one). It’s a bit naff (my theme, not the one I’ve based it on), but I’ll probably tidy it up as I go along.

I’ll be pushing some boundaries with some of the HTML/JS/CSS I use, so if you’re using an old browser, upgrade as I’ve no intention of supporting you. If you’re using IE6, just turn off your computer, go outside, and think a bit about where it all went wrong.