Mastermind in Clojure and Java

Have you heard of mastermind? It’s a logic game in which one player repeatedly tries determine the secret code that another player set at the beginning. With each guess, the player is given information on how many correct pegs his guess contains, and how many are in the correct position. For more details on the rules, check the wikipedia article.

I built a Clojure implementation of Mastermind as a learning project. (Code and details of functionality at github.) My primary goals were to gain familiarity with the language, and to see what the functional programming paradigm feels like when working on a project that is larger than one big function. After I finished, I re-implemented (almost) all of the features in Java for a comparison. (Code also available at github.) Interested in the results? read on.

Maintenance is no fun

I had fun creating @py3k_update, a twitter account that would send tweets announcing new libraries that are python 3 compatible. More here: http://wilsonericn.wordpress.com/2011/09/06/python-3-library-updates-via-twitter/

But when the page that I was scraping changed format, there was no joy in figuring out what to change to get the updates working accurately. I’ve got other fun and worthwhile things to do, both in programming, and in real life.

So thanks much to the 200+ folks that found @py3k_update worth following, I hope that you appreciated what it did provide, and aren’t too disappointed to see its demise.

Python 3 Library updates, via twitter

I’ve launched a new twitter account, @Py3K_update, which will send out tweets to notify followers when Python packages support Python 3. If this sounds like information that you want, please follow and/or tweet about this account.

If you are curious about the details, read on.