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I directly started with Haskell, but had some difficulties with the functional concepts! this is why I second the idea of michael_dorfman. I think it will help you a lot to understand everything better. and I personally like video lectures a lot. not that I'm lazy and don't want to read, but sometimes, when something is explained visually or by a specialist in the specific field, you just get it better in your head :)

I think this is a good idea to first learn the basic functional concepts using Scheme and the SICP videos (heard a lot of good things about the videos and the book). I'm learning Haskell (I'm a C# guy) and some things are a bit difficult to understand if you have an object oriented background. I think I'll have a look at the SICP videos, too

congrats on my part, too!

I had a look at the code (http://chyrp.net/code/files/includes/common-php.html) and after I clicked on "Blog" in the navigation on that page I got a 404 (seems like all links in the navigation point to an old version of the page, but the other links work). naturally it's nothing serious, I wanted only to inform you about this one :)

yeah, _why is a mistic (and pretty smart) individual. he's also a cool guy. I enjoyed watching the speech he gave at the ART && CODE Symposium: http://www.vimeo.com/5047563 .

oh, and thanks to raju for submitting the link; I last checked hackety.org about two weeks ago and it was down then. it's nice to see that hackety.org is up and running again.

I'm studying CS (in switzerland) and we've learned about state machines during a mathetmatics lecture in the second semester. that's it. since I didn't take the compiler class, this was the only lecture in which state machines were covered.

I personally think it's important to know about state machines. at least once in a lifetime you are going to write a DSL or parse specific input, and these are use cases were the application of state machines is pretty useful.

oh and by the way: Zed has written a nice tutorial about finite state machines, called "A Painless Introduction To Finite State Machines" and located at http://lamsonproject.org/docs/introduction_to_finite_state_m... . it's worth reading it if you're interested in the subject!

the new firefox is pretty fast and the new tab design looks good. I think I'll pause google chrome for a few days.

update: if you have issues with old addons in firefox 3.5, John Resig suggests you to do the following: Open about:config, right-click new boolean 'extensions.checkCompatibility', set false, restart. (via http://twitter.com/jeresig/status/2404695608)

I can recommend to install Yahoo YSlow (http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/), a Firebug extension for Firefox. next to the achieved performance test results of a specific page, it also shows how to improve the performance. I think it's a quite useful tool and perhaps a must-have extension for webdevelopers.

your words match exactly what I was going to write

the perfect platform for trolls!

it's truly lame, but I always have to laugh when I hit CTRL + END on their question-pages

yes, he really was that right (link to the post): http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2009/06/heres-what-opera-is-a...

yes. don't know when they introduced the apprenticeship as an application developer, but when I started (I started my apprenticeship ~ 7 years ago and completed it after 4 years) you could chose between system technician (or system engineer), supporter or application developer. (btw, please excuse my delayed answer)

after you've finished an apprenticeship as an application developer here in switzerland, you're a "programmer" and after getting your CS / SE degree (university), you're a "software engineer".

the lab start-page (http://labs.dragoninteractive.com) is even more worse. it's funny to have the task-manager open and watch the CPU usage while clicking through the site. poor, poor CPU

I think Wolfram Alpha targets a different target audience as Google does. I second the fact that WA appears to be a niche product, since a lot of people will find more information using Google rather than WA (the "Orson Welles" example is a good one. the second search result on Google is Welles' IMDB-page). summa sumarum we have to wait 'til the 18th of May to see what is hiding behind the big WA wall.

I didn't know that such a google-page actually exists, thanks. btw: gmail works for me at the moment (although its status is marked with "Service outage").

that's the same thought I had when I saw that Arial was the first item on their list. I once tried to use a non-monospaced font, but that lasted only a few seconds. it just doesn't fit!

my favorite programming font (and I think it is a pity that the article doesn't mention it): Envy Code R (http://damieng.com/blog/2008/05/26/envy-code-r-preview-7-cod...)

I just love this font! it's such a beautiful piece of font-design and I only can recommend you to try it out!

nice article. I have to admit, that after Apple and Intel "teamed" up I actually spent a thought on buying one, but my wallet was clearly against it since I'm a full time CS student. perhaps sometime in the future I'll buy a mac or I'll give OSx86 (http://www.osx86project.org/) a try.

when I switched to the low-light version my eyes applauded! looks very nice and the colors are in a very good combination.

regarding the standard version of the page, me and my eyes think that the blue-like color is not the best choice combined with the much smoother gray tones.

all told, I pretty much like the idea and the realization as a whole. keep it up!

that's not a bad idea, but as far as Wikipedia knows, there isn't a windows version of Drizzle available. this could eventually be a problem for some users.

years ago, when I got my first PC with a copy of Word installed on it, I actually enjoyed to create "letters" using the Comic Sans font. with the years, this special sentiment vanished and I started to dislike the font. I actually know a professor on our university that uses the font in his wiki and that is a little bit gross.

I love the loband version. the only thing I miss is a simple search box. so, hopefully they'll add it sometime in the future