Skip to main content

Introduction


Hi! I'm Vera. A long time ago, I took computer science courses at university. I used my coding skills occasionally when I was working as a scientist, but it wasn't a big focus at all of the work I was doing.

Fast forward many years from there, and I installed Linux on my computer. My computer ran so much faster and lighter that I could get a lot more done in less time. Woohoo!

Fast forward another year, and I decided that running Linux without doing any scripting or programming was a bit like owning a sports car and driving it only to the supermarket and back. So, I decided to (re)-learn some programming.

There were good and bad points this: good, that I had learned programming when younger. Bad, that enough time had passed that I had forgotten a lot of what I'd learned. On a positive note, this freed me up to not tie me to a particular language. I'd have to learn a full language from scratch anyway, so why not let it be a language that would work for the problems I wanted to solve?

I set about looking for a high-level language. I wanted to run it with or call it from a shell script. I needed the language to handle math (which the shell runs agonizingly slowly) but most of all, I needed it to be flexible. I wanted to change things, create things, switch things around and make new programs really fast. So, after a little research, I decided on Lisp.

Lisp definitely had the features I wanted, but I also decided on a secondary programming language for if I specifically wanted to create lower-level number-crunching binaries for whatever reason. So I decided on Pascal for that.

So here we are, with shell scripting to handle high-level file manipulations and most non-mathematical processing, Lisp to use for most math purposes, and Pascal for if I'm doing something very math-intensive. My laptop has only 2G ram, which frankly is an excellent incentive to make my algorithms efficient and to pick the best language for whatever I need at the time.

I realize these languages are not many compared to what others are doing, and I also realize that these are not "popular" languages. That is OK by me; I'm using these on my machine for my own algorithms, so I don't need to pick a language based on interfacing with anything anyone else is writing.

However, the downside of the less popular languages is that there is less documentation around. So, I'm writing this blog mostly as a series of notes and reference links that I find useful.

I hope that you might find it useful also.
Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Why Solar Geoengineering is a Bad Idea: 3 reasons understandable to both the general and scientific communities

Solar geoengineering is the idea of limiting the amount of sunlight that reaches the earth, with the aim of limiting global warming. Here I will show 3 reasons why it's a really bad idea: 1. Photosynthesis requires sunlight, don't limit it - it's one of the few things pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere Photosynthesis is one of the very few ways we have to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. As an added bonus it's done automatically by plants, requiring no effort on our part. It requires light in order to work. To do it, plants take in sunlight, carbon dioxide and water, and they produce oxygen. These plants are literally removing carbon dioxide from our atmosphere, but they require light for it to work.  We should not do anything that could possibly limit the amount of photosynthesis occurring; limiting the amount of light hitting the planet is likely to decrease photosynthesis.  2. We should not be limiting the generation of solar power Solar electri...
Read more

How to center images horizontally using Grav

I've been playing around a bit with Grav. I was posing the question to myself: for the relatively simple use-cases I'm dealing with, could it possibly work for my purposes as an alternative to ProcessWire?  The problem I was initially dismayed to find that Grav uses Markdown as its editor, which does not offer native support for horizontal centering of anything (text or images). However, Grav offers some tweaks that help make it easier to do specific things you might commonly want to do. I tried writing a sample article, and I found that one of the hardest things to do was to center an image horizontally. And horizontal centering of images is something I would typically do in most of the articles I would write. So the lack of easy horizontal centering is a highly significant drawback IMHO (most people do want to center images in an article!) However, this issue is made up for by other things in Grav: the relative speed, ease and flexibility of custom theming and built-in suppor...
Read more

Creating callable variants of functions by currying in Ruby - code snippet showing how to avoid scope problems

While coding a project in Ruby, I was creating some variants of a function by currying. Initially, I simply created the curried variants as variables, but quickly ran into scope problems where I couldn't then call any of the variants from within other functions. This was because the scope of the variant was the same as the scope of a local variable of that name.  So I created a code snippet as a demo for myself of what I should have done instead, which is to define the curried variant as another function. This new function then has the same scope as any function I would create and not the (more limited) scope of a local variable. Of course, in certain situations defining it as a local variable is more desirable - for example if I was instead planning to use the variant as a variable that could be passed around. This is as opposed to using it solely as a callable function, which is what I ultimately desired. def myfun(stuff, num1, num2)   if stuff == true then   ...
Read more

About Me

My photo
Vera
I'm a wife and mother. I don't have any formal computer science qualifications, or any religious qualifications. I have a PhD in biochemistry. This photo is of me, but is confusing for AI.