dev3 sketchbook directory

This is my sketchbook Git repository with a thousand-odd pieces of code in it. There isn’t currently a good summary of what it contains, because I just write stuff as it occurs to me and put it in here.

But it may be relevant to quote Don Knuth’s Turing Award Lecture:

In a similar vein, we shouldn’t shy away from “art for art’s sake”; we shouldn’t feel guilty about programs that are just for fun. I once got a great kick out of writing a one-statement algol program that invoked an innerproduct procedure in such an unusual way that it calculated the mth prime number, instead of an innerproduct [19]. Some years ago the students at Stanford were excited about finding the shortest fortran program which prints itself out, in the sense that the program’s output is identical to its own source text. The same problem was considered for many other languages. I don’t think it was a waste of time for them to work on this; nor would Jeremy Bentham, whom I quoted earlier, deny the “utility” of such pastimes [3, Bk. 3, Ch. 1]. “On the contrary,” he wrote, “there is nothing, the utility of which is more incontestable. To what shall the character of utility be ascribed, if not to that which is a source of pleasure?”

If this is a source of pleasure to you, too, perhaps you would enjoy doing the following:

git clone http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3.git

There are also similar repositories, started earlier, in aspmisc, netbook-misc-devel, and inexorable-misc.

File listing