Code as Language: Object-Orientation for the Complete Novice

This morning I sat on a conference call with the managers and bigwigs from a company I’m doing some programming work for. It was a progress update and when it came to me, I gave what I thought was a normal update. Something like: … we’re pretty close to having the object model developed and have been focusing on a user-based view of what the code needs to do and how users use it to… There was a...

Fun With Regex: Trying To Approach Natural Language Parsing

I hate Regular Expressions. I don’t hate them because they’re broken, or stupid, or don’t work. Rather, I hate them because I’m one of those few people who started programming back in the days of the Commodore Vic-20 and who still has not taken the time to learn them. Actually, I don’t hate them at all, I simply fear them. It’s like talking to a 50 year old who says “I...