Dear Python, something has been bothering me for a while. Its just that, well, ummm…you’re kind of ugly. Look, you are beautiful inside: Python is a beautiful language and the Python community is open and welcoming. But Python resources are ugly enough to affect usability and adoption. This is damaging to the community. Read more »

There is some famous research, by Saeed Dehnadi and Richard Bornat, about “programming sheep and non-programming goats.” The gist is that educators find that there are two populations of students, those who can program, and those who can’t. Each population has it’s own independent bell curve. This “double hump” persists despite variations in programming language, application type, IDE, and student motivation. Read more »

View an analysis of 222 famous programmers who are revered in the hacker culture as respected innovators, superstar coders, and the heroes of the computer revolution. Graphs break down the projects that propelled them to fame, the number of projects it took to make them famous, and the relative numbers of men and women who make up this elite group of famous hackers. Read more »

This is a Common Lisp code walkthrough for generating original jokes. You seed the generator with the knowledge about different objects, and it uses that vocabulary to generate unique jokes. All of the jokes are of the form: “What do you get when you cross X with Y?” This code was originally written for my CS288: An AI Approach to Natural Language Processing class at UC Berkeley in 2004. Read more »