“No book in shorter space, with fewer words, will help any writer more than this persistent little volume.” — The Boston Globe

A friend recommended a book to read, “The Elements of Style” by W. Strunk. It resonated with me strongly, here are a couple of quotes:

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all sentences short, or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.

• “Do not join independent clauses with a comma.” (Rule 5.)
• “Do not break sentences in two.” (Rule 6.) “Use the active voice.” (Rule 14.)
• “Use definite, specific, concrete language.” (Rule 16.) “Omit needless words.”
• (Rule 17.) “Avoid a succession of loose sentences.” (Rule 18.)

The book advocates and illustrates how to write forcibly, clearly, and succinctly; something I value and aspire to incredibly in all sorts of communication, but also in thinking. The book’s volume, 85 smaller-than-A5 pages, reinforces the message and makes it an ideal manual to keep at hand.

Link to the on-line version of the book: http://www.keck.ucsf.edu/~craig/The_Elements_of_Style.html

There is a whole Wikipedia article about it with some background history bits:

A major part of my work these days is connected with cfengine3 and writing promises. I’m kind of a vim-guy, so clearly I’m using it when writing cfengine promises and when you write a lot of code, you’d definitely want to make your development environment comfy and snug. Part of being comfy and sung in my understanding is syntax highlighting, which tremendously simplifies reading the code and makes you spot typos and other sorts of mistakes right away.

There’s an initial version of syntax highlighting for cfeninge, written by Neil Watson available on github. However, I wanted more sophisticated highlighting functionality, so I took Neil’s work and spent couple of weekends extending it. Here are some screenshots with results of that extension:

At the moment, the module highlights correctly cfengine-stdlib.cf and all cf files in examples/ directory of cfengine with exception of knowledge-related promises. There’s still a lot of work to do – a bit of refactoring and then, perhaps, a rudimental syntax checker – but it seems to me already usable, so I decided to release it’s “first” version.

The syntax highlighting module is available at https://github.com/ivanpesin/vim_cf3/tree/master/syntax. To activate it, you’ll need to save cf3.vim in ~/.vim/ directory and add following lines to your ~/.vimrc:

au BufRead,BufNewFile *.cf set ft=cf3
au! Syntax cf3 source $HOME/.vim/cf3.vim

Завершальна презентація циклу лекцій у Львівський Політехніці, що ми показали 18 квітня 2012 року.

Повнорозмірна версія презентації.

Привіт!

Презентація з лекції “SQL. Основи Темної Магії. Не SQL.”, яку читала Леся Гой у Львівський Політехніці в середу, 4 квітня.

Презентація з лекції “Чистий код”, яку читала Іра Заяць у Львівський Політехніці 18 квітня.

Повнорозмірна версія презентації.