computer

Need to make sure all bands are coming and have times. Need to make sure there are no conflicting events and make sure there will be infoshop people there during the day to help out with it.

Then need to make an event flier headlining the bands and asking people from SB to come and participate.

Then put up all over town for the 2 weeks before event, most of focus on week before event. 

Creating two dimensional artwork with a computer is far easier to get started in than three dimensional art for several reasons. First, far less computational power is required, second, the tools are more mature and intuative, and 3rd, its a lot easier to sit down and draw something than to create an elaborate 3d model.

Ruby is a very flexible and powerfull language developed by Yukihiro Matsumoto in the early 1990's. It focus on ease of coding, and the principal of least surprise.

See Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby

Ruby is a general purpose, fully object oriented language with many features common in high level functional languages and an easy to read C-like syntax.

Every object in ruby is an extensible object. For example, a traditional for loop would be written as :

for(int i=1;i<=10;i++){

printf("some stuff");

}

but in ruby, it could be written like this:

1.upto 10 do

print "some stuff"

end

or

1.upto(10) { print "some stuff"}

or

(1..10).each {print "some stuff"}

or even

10.times {print "some stuff"}

The above samples point out some fairly significant features of ruby.

• Note that the number 1 is an object, so is the range "(1..10)", and methods of these objects can be called.
• Blocks of code are objects that can be passed to functions as arguments.
• Iteration is performed by passing a block of code to a function. For example, most collections impliment an "each" method that executes a block of code passed to it repeatedly, each time it passes a different member of the collection to the block.
• upto is a function that all integers posess. It is equivalent of creating a collection of all integers between the integer on which the method is invoked, and passing a block to the collection's each method.

Classes are also objects in ruby, and can be modified at runtime. For example, if you want to add a new method to all integers, this is possible, just like adding an element to an array.

Ruby is best used with duck typing, as built in types and individual objects can be extended.

An often undesired side affect of flexability in any language (ruby is one of the most flexable languages) is poor performance. Ruby's performance is among the slowest of any modern programming languages. Conversely, ruby development times are among the quickest.

Many alternatives to Ruby have arrisen, largely to increase portability and performance of the languages. There is no standard defining the Ruby language, so the "official" interpreter is generally used as the de facto reference. At least two other implimentations exist that use Just in time (JIT) compilation for a significant performance boost.

Lisp is one of the oldest and most innovative programming languages still in use. It has been viewed as an academic language, but recent advances in compiler optimization have increased the performance and practicality of lisp programs to the point that it now rivals and occasionally beats C for raw performance.

Lisp is generally considered the most flexible and extensible computer programming language due to its ability to add language syntax the way modern languages extend a class library. The (perhaps daunting) flexibility of the language can trivialize tasks that would be considered highly complex, if not impossible in other languages.

Lisp is actually a family of languages, the most prominent two of which are common lisp (properly ANSI Common Lisp) and scheme (properly MIT Scheme). The most common variant for practical use is common lisp, which has several free open source compilers and interpreters. Scheme is far simpler and less inclusive than common lisp, and is primarily used to study computer science.

The drawbacks of learning lisp are nearly as overwhelming as the benefits. Just reading lisp can seem alien to many programmers due to its use of prefix notation. For example:

SomeFunc(2*3+4/2 , 42) // everybody knows what this means

is written as

(some-func (+ (* 2 3) (/ 4 2)) 42) ;wtf

Also, the ansi spec for common lisp is deliberately vague, so that compilers can interpret a few things differently than other compilers. Fortunately, Steel Baron Common Lisp (SBCL), the compiler that has the best performance on most benchmarks is also the most commly used.

And the performance for most uses is less than that of other compiled languages, like C, C++ and even Java. Benchmarks that favour lisp over other languages largely have to do with list processing, which the language was invented for. Also, for code to perform well in lisp, it must be well coded. The distinction between tail recursion, and regular recursion is critical, because the only mechanisms for iterative processing are implemented recursively.

External Links

• Lisp as An Alternative to Java by Erann Gat
• Object Oriented and Procedural Lisp from lisp.org
• On Lisp by Paul Graham
• Practical Common Lisp by Peter Seibel
  • Also available in HTML here.
• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

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