#{Boontdusties.com}

Tim has presented a call to determine the best programming language for leading groups of people in CODE chants. I think this an interesting idea, especially if the same code can be compiled or ‘interpreted on the fly’ in the real world with real applications.

I don’t know perl, but my friend Joseph has written an amazing poem using that programming language which I am told will actually run! lainey

Go and read it there, it’s short and sweet.

I would recommend trying the chants in ruby – there is a lot of fairly human readable helpers and natural aspects of the language that would make writing religious chants for it pretty easy. Here’s a simple one I did just messing around – (there are parts of it that don’t work the way I want, I’m still messing with them).

class Remember

  def the_sounds_of_this_moment
    { :you_have_forgotten => "#{Time.now}"}
  end #ing

  # so in
  @thismoment = "there is no sound"

  def all_sound
    #but
    begin # in this
      case @thismoment
        when "there is sound" then "the sound breaks" and break;
        when "there is no sound"    then "just hope for the"
      end # can we
      raise "the dead?"
    rescue
      p "our souls, there is no rescue, there is only that moment that past, that moment of'"
    end
  end
end

In IRB you can do this:

irb(main):048:0> now = Remember.new
=> #

irb(main):049:0> now.the_sounds_of_this_moment
=> {:you_have_forgotten=>”Sun Dec 21 12:50:34 -0800 2008″}

irb(main):050:0> now.all_sound
“our souls, there is no rescue, there is only that moment that past, that moment of’”
=> nil

I also have an idea to write some prayers into some source code – I’m trying to think of the best way to do this though since it’s not really clear to me how an application would continuously ‘pray’ ? Could that perhaps mean the prayer would be kicked off in a separate thread to just loop over a block of text (a String) and read each character byte by byte ?

My interest in this is that the function being called would serve no clear technical purpose whatsoever – in fact it would just be ‘wasting resources’. But built into the right application you could say that the prayers being evoked are epically more powerful than any individual human may be able to do on their own. You may never need to pray yourself again – instead you could farm all of that work off to a cluster of computers who could work tirelessly to petition the Gods for all of your spiritual needs.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 21st, 2008 at 2:14 pm and is filed under Open Discussion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.