So long, and thanks for all the books!

My first contact with Douglas Adams' work was through Netflix' Dirk Gently's Hollistic Detective  Agency series, based on a novel by Adams himself. It was love at first sight for me, the hilarious absurdity, strenous suspense and interesting character development heavily reminded me of Good Omens by Terry Pratchet and Neil Geiman, a very brittish book about the Apocalypse, kids, music, religion, space, Atlantis, witchcraft, and friendship.Right off the bat, the general feel of the series seemed to be tailor-made for my taste in humor. 

I had already purchased both The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, but hadn't had the time to read them. I was very excited to actually open these books back in January because I would finally look at Adams' magnus opus and the start of it all.

And it didn't fail to impress.

I wasn't really expecting such a complex space epic, my idea of this book was that of a brittish joke fest, but the interesting characters, space lore, and background made it quite the treat to read. The language used to describe abstract events is also pretty impressive and a very strong quality in the first book, Adams has quite the way with words and can make everything sound relatable and understandable.

Even if the book shouldn't be taken in a serious note, some things seem to be written in order to move or impress the reader such as the description of the coastline factory in Magrathea. He can create a sense of wonder in the reader with spectacular descriptions blown out of proportion, and make them laugh in the small details that decorate every single dialogue.

What's also noteworthy is the cultural impact this series has had, specially in the field of computer science. Most language tutorials use 42 (which is the meaning of Life, the Universe, and everything) for their numerical examples, and Marvin is one of the most recognisable robots in sci-fi history, even if people haven't seen the movie. Not to even mention the rampant jokes about the Babel Fish.

There's a lot that could be said about Mr. Adams, but, quite frankly, as of now, I'd rather keep learning myself by reading his work, than talk straight out of the Wikipedia article.

So long, and thanks for all the reads!

Building Server-Side Web Language Processors (Commentary)

 

When talking about web programming and same ol' regular software programming, there are a lot of details to take into account. It is only natural to think that same principle applies when talking about the compilers and their attributes for each of these particular jobs. 

First of all, web applications are significantly more vulnerable to security attacks, particularily those involving string management. Cross-site scripting, and SQL injections were big names back in the day before people thought about removing certain characters from inputs, or blocking them entirely. Even though some of these problems could be perfectly dealt with in the development stage, developers won't make a mistake we don't allow them to make form the start.

Then there's the matter of the Web itself. Server, clients, and requests are central elementes of Web application development. A compiler for web-focused languages should be fundamentally concerned with the management of these three aspects, specially when they are being created for the server side of the equation. 

Last, but not least (though, a bit periferal) is modularity. A web-based compiler should be light enough to be inserted in markup language templates (HTML based pages,  XML documents, etc.), either as a series of tags, or even as a single tag. This could also mean that our web-based compiler could work alongside already established, widely used net frameworks.