NLTK’s dispersion_plot on Mac OS X

While reading “Natural Language Processing with Python” I ran into problems on my Mac with examples that were using the dispersion_plot function: calls to the function returned immediately without displaying anything.

Turns out matplotlib’s back-end wasn’t configured properly. To fix this I had to add a rc file (matplotlibrc) to my ~/.matplotlib directory. The rc file contains the following:

And, hey presto:

(disclaimer: “Works on my machine!”)

My Reading List for 2010

One of the suggestions of “The Pragmatic Programmer” is that you should learn at least one new programming language every year. This is a great suggestion, but after a couple of years its usefulness diminishes, e.g. if one already knows Perl and Python, then the payback on learning Ruby is rather small. Therefore I’m going to concentrate on the foundations of programming languages this year. Here’s my tentative reading list:

• Design Concepts in Programming Languages
• Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming
• Types and Programming Languages

Suggestions welcome.