Archive 20. July 2011

ShareMeNot. Firefox extension that filters out the various social buttons, so that the corresponding services cannot see the visited pages (because this data is also transmitted when the buttons are not clicked - for example, the icon is usually hosted by the service provider and they can see the visited pages in the logs via the referrer, provided you are logged in to one of the services, they can also see the user who visited the page via the login cookie).

Pattern Matching In Python. Interesting article for people like me, i.e. for people who like Snobol4 or its "successor" (in quotation marks, because it is then a completely different language) Icon and would like an alternative to regular expressions. Implements a pattern-matching system very similar to the Icon model, complete with backtracking and generators. However, it is from 2004 and is rather a proof-of-concept story, not necessarily a directly usable and installable Python module. Unlike SnoPy, it is pure Python and not a Swig-based wrapper for an Ada Library.

Bash on Balls. For the moments in life where even Visual Basic would be too much - a web framework for Bash scripts. Naturally uses a few Unix tools in addition, especially Netcat for network I/O. And yes, it comes with a complete server and everything, just as one would imagine. Even has Dev-Code-Reload and such things, as well as a template language. And with BoB a nice acronym. (and unlike Cobol on Cogs this is a project that one can actually run and not just a joke)

FAQ - Kotlin - Confluence. The fifty-third Java-killer language for the JVM, which also attacks Scala here (the usual argument "Scala is too complicated", which on first glance is indeed true - Scala has few central basic features, which are then provided with many features for the programmer by the standard library and the good DSL possibility at the surface of the actual language). The question remains what will come of it, but since JetBrains is behind it, it will at least have a good IDE (JetBrains builds IntelliJ and other JVM IDEs, including PyCharm and with AppCode the only current OSX Objective-C alternative to XCode). And hey, anyone who names their language after an island near St. Petersburg already has a head start with me.