Hacker Howto

Nat Friedman has an excellent, succinct post on How To Become a Hacker.

Programming Languages

I would suggest that any fellow programmer out there who is interested in the advanced concepts of our art should take a look at the article A Critical Look at Programming Languages by Tim Sweeney. For anyone experienced in functional or logic programming there may be nothing new there, but for me at least it was a revelation. More than anything it was this article which instilled in me the desire to create my own programming language (thus planting the seeds of my own destruction). To this day I still get a thrill when I think of the phrase "function composition and the monadic combinators of Haskell". I'm still not clear what those are, but it's definitely something new under the sun for me to explore.

Also, for anyone interested in the actual Haskell language, but having trouble understanding how IO works, I'd like to recommend Tutorial #1 at the Lambda Complex. I've read a few entry-level texts on the language and this is the one that finally made things click together for me.

Finally for those of you who might be interested in the latest news from the forefront of Programming Languages, you could do worse than to stop by Lambda the Ultimate

TiddlyWiki

I just have to say that TiddlyWiki is one of the coolest hacks I've seen in a long time. For those of you who don't like to blindly click links, I think this blurb from the website sums it up quite well:

One of the neatest features of TiddlyWiki is that it is entirely self-contained in a single HTML file. It contains the actual hypertext document, and the JavaScript, CascadingStyleSheets and HTML necessary to both view and edit the document. This means that it is trivial to host a TiddlyWiki on a website, or to distribute one by email. And anyone with a reasonably recent web browser will be able to read and edit it.

If you don't know what a Wiki is you may not care, but my amazement at this thing has steadily grown in the few days since I ran across it. The WikiOnAStick idea in particular is my favorite aspect so far.