I think BASIC's greatest strength may be that it was something that many people -- not just those with a particular background -- could learn. There was no gatekeeper, either literally or figuratively: you didn't have to push punchcards under a bank-teller window nor did you have to learn recursion before learning …

Prime numbers are not my thing, but generating them is a common task in the early Project Euler problems. The one algorithm I know for generating primes is the Sieve of Eratosthenes, which I defined in Scala as:

[sourcecode lang="scala"]
def successor(n : Double) : Stream[Double] = Stream.cons(n …

I'm getting to the point in my Scala understanding where I'm making small commits to our Very Important Project at work. I ended up wasting four hours of work the other day because I put stuff in the wrong place and then spent a lot of time reorganizing things. In …

Taking my own 15 Exercises to Know A Programming Language as a starting point for my exploration of Scala...

The first set of exercises are right up the alley of a language with pattern-matching and list-processing:

Write a program that takes as its first argument one of the words ‘sum …