Simon Willison’s Weblog

why’s potion. why’s latest project is a small, fast language (JIT to x86/x86-64) which seems to take ideas from Ruby, Lua, Python and who knows where else. Everything is based around objects, closures and mixins, with the delightful inclusion of scoped mixins so you can modify an object only within a certain module (hence avoiding Ruby’s action-at-a-distance problems).

# 8th January 2009, 6:37 pm / closures, jit, languages, lua, mixins, potion, programming, ruby, whytheluckystiff

Google Translate (beta). Google’s beta translator based on statistical analysis of things like the United Nations corpus. I have no idea how long this has been available; it isn’t linked from their homepage.

# 3rd July 2007, 4:43 pm / google, i18n, internationalisation, languages, translation