(Background: 12 Projects in 2013)

I wrote a bit about the general experience of programming in Icon a couple of weeks ago. This post is a brief post-mortem about a project that I tried to build using Icon. I'm not planning on releasing the source, because I don't ...

(Background: 12 New Languages in 2013)

Icon is a cool little programming language. It's worth learning, even if it isn't practical for daily use.

Pros:

• Syntax is similar to C, which makes it easy to learn.
• A handful of publication-quality Icon books (now out of print) are available ...

As I mentioned in 12 New Languages, I'm learning a new programming language each month in 2013. To go along with this effort, I need a dozen things worth building -- one for each language.

I'm going to try to play to the strengths of each language. Here's ...

I'm setting a personal goal in 2013 to learn a new programming language each month. Obviously, I won't be able to learn any of them in depth, but I plan on completing a small project in each language.

• January: Icon
• February: Go
• March: Common Lisp
• April: Scala
• May ...

ISC's dhcpd uses this code to check for an already-running daemon:

/* Read previous pid file. */
if ((i = open (path_dhcpd_pid, O_RDONLY)) >= 0) {
    status = read (i, pbuf, (sizeof pbuf) - 1);
    close (i);
    if (status > 0) {
        pbuf [status] = 0;
        pid = atoi (pbuf);        /* If the previous server process is not still running,
           write ...