Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Monday, 8th March 2010

Scott and Scurvy. Did you know that Scott’s 1911 expedition to the south pole was plagued by scurvy, despite the British navy having discovered an effective cure way back in the 18th century? A fascinating tale of how scientific advances can lead to surprising regressions.

# 6:15 pm / scurvy, science, maciejceglowski

grammar.coffee (via) The annotated grammar for CoffeeScript, a new language that compiles to JavaScript developed by DocumentCloud’s Jeremy Ashkenas. The linked page is generated using Jeremy’s Docco tool for literate programming, also written in CoffeeScript. CoffeeScript itself is implemented in CoffeeScript, using a bootstrap compiler originally written in Ruby.

# 7:27 pm / compilers, javascript, coffeescript, documentcloud, jeremy-ashkenas, docco, literateprogramming, programming, selfhosting, ruby