David Welton's Programming Stuff

I have eclectic tastes, and that holds true for software as well. Over the years, I've dabbled with many different systems. If you'd like to keep track of my current doings, I have an online journal here: journal.dedasys.com.

In addition to the projects below, some of the bits and pieces of free software I've made available here: /files, various patches here: patches/, and a list of programming books that I feel are classics that won't go out of date any time soon. And finally, here is a silly Java applet that I made years ago: Googly Eyed Bill.

Current Projects:

Hecl - The Mobile Scripting Language is a high-level scripting language implemented in Java. It is intended to be small, extensible, extremely flexible, and easy to learn and use. It is intended as a complement to the Java programming language, not a replacement. As such, it tries to do well what Java doesn't, and leaves those tasks to Java for which it is best suited. It is also easy to add Hecl to Java, or write new Hecl commands in Java. It aims to be a very immediate language so that you can pick it up and start doing useful things with it quickly. Of particular interest is the fact that it's small enough to run on Java-enabled cell phones, so you can quickly script applications for them!

(in Italian) LinuxSì is a place to share and find information about computer stores in Italy that are Linux friendly, sell hardware sans Windows, or even with Linux installed.

langpop.com is a site that collects and displays statistics about the popularity of various programming languages.

Past Projects:

In the past, I did a lot of work with the Tcl programming language, which is often unfairly maligned by those with a poor or outdated understanding of it.

I am the "Vice President" of Apache Tcl within the Apache Software Foundation, and the co-author of Apache Rivet (like PHP, but uses Tcl), and have also contributed to WebSH.

I have been a Debian maintainer since 1997. I'm still very grateful to Debian for the opportunity it represented in terms of learning and getting involved with free software. These days, I mostly use Ubuntu, which is a derivative of Debian.

eCos - eCos is an embedded, real time operating system. I have written a couple of example applications for it:

Scivoli is an operating system + images that boots from the floppy and displays the images.
ZOG is a forth interpreter (ficl) ported to eCos to provide an interactive shell.

TclMagick is a Tcl (and Tk) interface to the GraphicksMagick / ImageMagick image libraries. Particularly useful because it handles all kinds of image formats, and doesn't require Tk to run, although a Tk interface exists to display images. I aided in the development of TclMagick and created the TkMagick Tk glue.

Emacs - Emacs is an editor, and much, much more. I have written some fun and useful extensions for it:

uptime.el - uptime.el is an emacs "uptime" function, in the sense that it keeps track of how long your emacs session has been running. Some people leave it running for weeks or months at a time.
two-mode-mode.el switches between two modes, depending on context. Useful for editing one language embedded within another (such as Tcl interspersed with HTML). I wrote it so that I could edit files for mod_dtcl in Emacs.
rhtml-minor-mode.el is a minor mode for Emacs for editing .rhtml files as a part of ruby on rails applications. I use psgml mode for HTML, and it wants to have access to the DTD, so in order to work with fragments, you need to point to the external file (in the layouts/ directory) that contains the DTD and top level HTML elements.