Programmers Dojo

I had a buddy ask me about learning the Scheme programming language... so I figured I'd write a blog post about it! First a very short history. A long time ago (in 1958) there was born a language called Lisp.  Lisp is actually the second oldest high level language but that's a different post.  Lisp split into two main branches Common Lisp and Scheme. Common Lisp is quite large and has lots of features including a full OO system.  Scheme on the other hand is as stripped down as is practical.  For comparison the Common Lisp spec has ~1100 pages while the Scheme R5RS spec has 50 pages. That being said Scheme has low level primitives which allow you to build high level primitives. There are lots of great resources out there for learning Scheme and I'm going to list a few here. Textbooks: The Scheme Programming Language The Little Schemer The Seasoned Schemer Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs  - AKA: SICP Free textbooks: How to Design P

The  top500 list has been swamped by x86 machines over the last several years.  Anyone who knows me is aware that I am NO fan of the x86 ISA. Somewhat heartening is that the most recent list seen a resurgence in other architectures.  The Power architecture from IBM has been a fixture on the list for a long and is still a strong contender even though it has fallen to No. 12 from No. 9 last time and No. 1 in November of 2007. A Sparc machine has captured the No. 1 place this year and is actually as powerful as the the No. 2 through No. 6 systems combined. The Chinese MIPS based Loongson processor is starting to make some noise and the Dawning 6000 is reported to eventually reach a Petaflop in computing power. One other note is that an increasing number of machines in the top500 list rely heavily on GPUs.  The No. 2 machine on the current list, the Chinese Tianhe-1a machine, is comprised of 14,336 Intel Xeon processors and 7,168 Nvidia Tesla GPUs. Now I guess we just hav