nene

Ruby was my main choice + some command line tools to do bits of extra work, like 'sort' to find the largest palindrome and 'wc' to count the results in last exercise, and even Python command line to just manually sum the primes in second exercise.

I'm usually pretty bad at these kind of challenges (lately I tried registering at one mind-challenges site, but I couldn't even get past the five entry-level questions, which would have allowed me to even register), but this was surprisingly easy. Simple brute-force methods worked for each of the three tasks. I was totally surprised that the first time I entered the answer for each of the tasks, it was indeed the correct one.

But then again... these are all pretty standard computer science problems, nothing that I hadn't in some way done before.

On a side-note: Interestingly I used recursion for each of the three problems. Well... actually for the primes-problem I got stack overflow and rewrote it to not use recursion, but still, at least in principle :=)

What is a Qwiki anyway?

It's probably not this Quantum Physics Wiki: http://qwiki.stanford.edu/

Indeed... Believing Microsoft won't patent-troll is like believing Oracle when they say'd they're against Software Patents. It's just a matter of time when some CEO will notice a good opportunity to make money with patents.

But I digress... Currently Microsoft isn't doing anything evil. Making software patents harder to get is clearly a step in the right direction.

But it's far from Microsoft saving us all from software patents.

I don't really buy all this big campaign to promote MDC.

First of all, I do it anyway. I constantly promote the MDC resources when ever I write a blog or forum post about some JavaScript thingie.

Secondly, the MDC site itself is not a perfect guide to JavaScript. Just look at the main page - https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript - it's overwhelming. Even though I use it frequently, it still makes me feel lost. Plus it has the same academic feel as W3C pages, and you know what... HTML spec is not the first result in google for "html" either.

Compare all this to the w3schools page on JavaScript: http://www.w3schools.com/js/default.asp It might not be teaching the best practices, but it sure as hell is a lot clearer than the MDC page.

Therefore I would suggest that MDC guys follow the first rule of SEO: just make a better site.

I've had almost exactly the same experience.

I had made several attempts at learning how recursive descent parser works, but with little success. Finally I stumbled on this amazing text...

All other resources try to scare you by telling how scientifically mind-blowing subject the compiler construction is... this text simply shows how easy it can be.

Hey, you can't post a link to Hacker News starting with "Brooks:" when it's not Fred Brooks. Seriously! Who is this David?