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Showing posts from December, 2008

#QCON - Functional Programming, Music and Art

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Last month, at QCON, I was in a great talk about functional programming languages (like Haskell) and their benefits to the Art world. The title of the talk was "How Functional Programmers can Help, Inspire, or even Be Artists". First of all I'd like to emphasize that all good programmers are artists, and as Richard Gabriel said 6 years ago , we programmers should be trained like artists. This is the major problem of our Computer Science Courses. We all know artificial intelligence and computer tools are getting better and better. Right know we can easily produce things like this video: In his talk, Prof. Paul Hudak also showed the examples of how we can do image animation using functional programming. The project he described was the Functional Reactive Animation (FRAN) . All these things are not really new, but now that functional languages are returning to the main stream, those are the things that begin to appear. With tools like FRAN, an animation can be made as easy ...

Patterns for Introducing New Ideas - Video Talk

A new video I made last week at Locaweb about Patterns for Introducing New Ideas. Sorry, but these videos are in Portuguese. Click the YouTube link up here to see other parts... :-)

Breakfast as QCON SF 2008 with Martin Fowler

For me, it was an honor to eat my morning croissant with Martin Fowler. Sharing my emotion with you!

Thinking = Language

Last week, walking along the San Francisco streets, I had many insights . It was a great week at QCON , where I could meet many of the great people in the software development world. I'd like to share with you one of my biggest insights. It has to do with how language is deeply related to thinking. English is not my first language (I was born in Brazil and here we speak Portuguese), so I don't know English as I know Portuguese. When I was in San Francisco, I've created a challenge for myself: I wouldn't think in Portuguese. I had to think everything in English. This was a great experience: I noticed that I just couldn't think well! Once I didn't have the right words to represent my thoughts , the thoughts couldn't come. Right now, even writing, I'm trying to say something to you, but I just can't do it properly! So I decided to train my abilities, not just in speaking or writing English, but in THINKING. That's why I decided to write my blog in ...