Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Find me here:
What's the difference between a programming language and a scripting language? Is there even a difference at all? Larry Wall's epic Programming is Hard, Let's Go Scripting attempts to survey the scripting landscape and identify commonalities. When you go out to so-called primitive tribes
Have you ever used those self-service checkout machines at a grocery store or supermarket? What fascinates me about self-service checkout devices is that the store is making you do work they would normally pay their employees to do. Think about this for a minute. You're playing the role
In my previous post, a commenter asked this question: So many of the best minds I have met in computing have a love for music. Is it something to do with being able to see beauty in complex numerical systems? I adore music. I have a vast music collection and
Alan Kay is one of my computing heroes. All this stuff we do every day as programmers? Kay had a hand in inventing a huge swath of it: Computer scientist Kay was the leader of the group that invented object-oriented programming, the graphical user interface, 3D computer graphics, and ARPANET,
From the dawn of the web – at least since Netscape Navigator 4.x – it has been possible to resize the text on a web page. This is typically done through the View menu. This was fine in the early, primitive days of the web, when page layouts were simple and
In the C programming language, you're regularly forced to deal with the painful, dangerous concepts of pointers and explicit memory allocation. b1 = (double *)malloc(m*sizeof(double)); In modern garbage collected programming languages, life is much simpler; you simply new up whatever object or variable you need. Double[
I don't usually do news and current events here, but I'm making an exception for the CWE/SANS Top 25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors list. This one is important, and deserves a wide audience, so I'm repeating it here -- along with a brief
I saw a screenshot a few days ago that made me think Windows 7 Beta might actually be worth checking out. That's right, Microsoft finally improved the calculator app! We've been complaining for years that Microsoft ships new operating systems with the same boring old default
Paul Buchheit, the original lead developer of GMail, notes that the success of GMail was a long time in coming: We starting working on Gmail in August 2001. For a long time, almost everyone disliked it. Some people used it anyway because of the search, but they had endless complaints.
Several high profile Twitter accounts were recently hijacked: An 18-year-old hacker with a history of celebrity pranks has admitted to Monday's hijacking of multiple high-profile Twitter accounts, including President-Elect Barack Obama's, and the official feed for Fox News. The hacker, who goes by the handle GMZ,
Do you manage other programmers, in any capacity? Then take Kathy Sierra's quiz: 1. Do you pride yourself on being "on top of" the projects or your direct reports? Do you have a solid grasp of the details of every project? 2. Do you believe that
In yesterday's post, I asked this question: Let's say, hypothetically speaking, you met someone who told you they had two children, and one of them is a girl. What are the odds that person has a boy and a girl? Most people answer 50%. Unfortunately, this