Rosetta Code Blog

Activity
There hasn’t been too much activity this week. A lot of it was with the new languages (see below). There was a lot of syntax highlighting work done for Ada in response to a new TODO item. That item has been removed after Short Circuit announcemed new plans for syntax highlighting. Also, a new interwiki link prefix was added for the esolangs wiki.

New Languages
SETL has been added to RC. It is apparently quite old (it was used for the first Ada compiler). Don’t worry about it being too complex, though, it looks very similar to Pascal. Clojure was added late in the week by a new user, Wynand.winterbach. It is a Lisp-like language which compiles into bytecode that can be interpreted by a JVM (pause for a bit while your brain recovers). Neither of these languages has many examples yet.

Still Needed
The TODO page still has some bot-like items on it. The most important ones are probably the last three: merging some tasks together, fixing “needs-review” examples, and tranferring examples from Loop Structures to Iteration. You could help out with these while you wait for the new skin to be finalized.

Activity
Most of the activity on the site lately has been related to the new skin. As far as programming examples go, an anonymous user started beefing up VB.NET. A new user started to let us know of some changes coming in Python 3.0. Also, Slawmaster has added a few AWK examples.

New Task
Pascal’s triangle is the first new task for a while. In it, a function must print out n rows of the triangle, which is an important tool in probability. The task has quickly grown to 8 languages.

Still Needed
Ideas. Tell us what you want the site to do. Tell us what needs to change. We like feedback of any kind, and we will try to help with any problems. Without new ideas it will just be business as usual around here.

Activity
A lot has happened since the last update, but not necessarily on the task pages. As mentioned in a previous post, we got a hosting upgrade. Pages should load faster now, and we got a new look (see below). The forum is also gone. Discussion pages should be sufficient for most questions. Other questions should go to the IRC channel, the wiki replacement for the forum, or directly to users.

The encyclopedia got hit up by Slawmaster, who worked on Plan 9 recently (so he’s credible on the subject). As far as tasks go, Ada has gotten some attention from Dmitry-kazakov, but as stated before, task activity has been quite light.

New Skin and Userpage Doodads
Qrush has added a new skin to the wiki, which is in a testing phase. To use it, go to your preferences after you’ve logged in, click “Skin”, and select “Rosetta”. It’s pretty neat-looking. Qrush has also given us a new logo to go with the skin and a new favicon.

Qrush has also added the NotmyLang templates for your userpage. These templates work similarly to the myLang templates, but they’re for languages that you don’t like to use.

Still Needed
Testing for the new Rosetta skin. Let Qrush know if there are any problems. Make sure you tell him which browser you’re using (the version is also helpful). If the problem you have is difficult to explain, screenshots are always good.

Rosetta Code is now hosted on a Slicehost slice graciously provided by Qrush.  This has allowed us to greatly improve the performance of the slice, as well as enable us to investigate a host of new features.

DNS propagation can take up to 24 hours, meaning it may not be complete until 7AM EST.

Activity
Badmadevil has posted a link to a javascript program that may grant a wish for a “tasks not completed by language X” page. He also filled in Loops and a few other tasks for D, and added a new task (more on that later). Spoon! contributed Python examples to many tasks.

New Tasks and Pages
Power set is a classic programming task (from the request page) which probably should have been added before. The power set of a set is a set of all subsets of that set. This task asks the programmer to generate these subsets. The task page is not a definition of a programming task, but a task from the view of the operating system. Encyclopedic pages like this are very important to RC, and any computer science knowledge that can be summarized in a simple fashion (as well as in CS terms) is appreciated.

Still Needed
Promotion for this site. If you know any good programmer, tell them to contribute to RC. If you know someone who is struggling with learning something about programming, refer them to RC. We can’t have too many cooks in this kitchen. We need all the users we can get.

Sorry for the delayed post. I thought it had already been published.

Activity
Dimitry-kazakov came in to help with Ada examples. Lupus filled in the Loops tasks for Fortran, along with a few math themed tasks. There were a few more spam attacks, but new captcha rules should stop that. On the community side, a Mibbit page has now been added so that people can chat in the IRC channel without a client. We’d like to hear your input, so stop by and chat with us.

New Tasks and Pages
A few new tasks have started on RC. In Maximum value, the programmer must select the largest value in an array. In Varargs, a function must take in a variable number of arguments and print them all. These tasks are filling up fast. Array initialization is another syntax task, but it has some discussion going on about what exactly needs to happen in it. It may be difficult to get answers about the original intention of the task since its creator was an anonymous user. Also, someone finally gave us a Closure explanation.

Still Needed
Fill in some of the stubs for language and library pages. People need to know what they’re for before they learn how to use them. Also, we still need a Monad page to go with Closures.

Attention: Mac Administrators.  Did you know that many of the features of your operating system and applications can be scripted using AppleScript, or even JavaScript?  If you’ve done such scripting, or even if you’re interested in learning how, why don’t you give Rosetta Code a hand with those languages?

You could…

• …Solve a task that hasn’t been solved in either AppleScript or JavaScript.
• …Create some generic automation tasks.

Thank you for your time.

Activity
Not a lot happened in the last week. Pop11 and Ada have continued to get attention from anonymous users. Mathematica got a big boost from Ce. IanOsgood added a few more Logo examples.

Still Needed
Discussion! Comment here, post in the forum, hit up the talk pages, or chat in the IRC channel (#rosettacode on freenode). The hardcore users don’t bite and we would like to know what you think of the site and how we can make it better.

Activity
An anonymous user returned to add Pop11 to many tasks (Pop11 is up to 94 tasks). IanOsgood went Logo loco (Logo is up to 52). There were two small spam attacks on the comments page, but they have been fixed.

New tasks
A new bitwise task, Bit Shifts, was added. It was quickly merged with Bitwise operations, which now needs to be checked over. A new sort has come in, too. The Shell sort only has a few examples, but they should be easy to translate into other languages. It’s best implementations are O(nlog²n), but it is still a good exercise.

Still needed
The Bitwise operations page now has several incorrect examples with the addition of bit shifting. If you know how to do bit shifting (or that bit shifting isn’t available) in any of the languages on the page, fill in the required information.

Activity
Not much happened this week.

There were a lot more anonymous user edits than usual. Balrog continued the Fortran maintenance, while an anonymous user added a few more examples for it. OCaml got a boost by Spoon!. Several other languages got an example here or there. Dirkt added and fixed up RCSNUSP/Haskell. There was a small spam attack on the PHP page. J got a new, more commercial-like description.

Still needed
Syntax highlight tasks when you add new examples. Check the list of supported languages and add tags where you can. This site could use some beautifying. Why not make it a bit more readable while we’re at it? Also, let Short Circuit know if any highlighting is wrong or incomplete.

Every user mentioned in this post still needs a user page.