programming languages
Brian Kuhn recently described the real risk of technocentrism. [..] people use (or have rejected) particular operating systems, tools, and software that has in turn shaped their perceptions when it comes to making judgments on the various merits of particular technologies. People tend to categorize or identify themselves with particular "
software development
Nathan Myhrvold [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Myhrvold], the former CTO of Microsoft, is also a bona-fide physicist. He holds physics degress from UCAL and Princeton. He even had a postdoctoral fellowship under the famous Stephen Hawking. Thus, as you might expect, his 1997 ACM keynote presentation, The Next
programming languages
Though I've become agnostic about the utterly meaningless non-choice between VB.NET and C#, the inherited syntax of C leaves a lot to be desired, in my opinion. And not just in the case sensitivity department. Daniel Appleman, in his excellent e-book, VB.NET or C#, Which to
javascript
The 1996 JavaWorld article Is JavaScript here to stay? is almost amusing in retrospect. John Lam recently observed that JavaScript is the world's most ubiquitous computing runtime. I think the answer is an emphatic yes. JavaScript is currently undergoing a renaissance through AJAX. Sure, the AJAX-ified clones of
programming languages
I've written before about the dubious value of functional specifications. If you want to experience the dubious value of specifications first hand, try writing a tool to read and write ID3 tags. ID3 tags describe the metadata for an MP3 file, such as Artist, Album, Track, and so
programming languages
Stiff recently asked a few programmers a series of open-ended questions: * How did you learn programming? Were schools of any use? * What's the most important skill every programmer should have? * Are math and physics important skills for a programmer? * What will be the next big thing in computer
xml
Here's a helpful article that documents some common pitfalls to avoid when composing XML documents. Nobody wants to be called an XML Bozo by Tim Bray, the co-editor of the XML specification, right? There seem to be developers who think that well-formedness is awfully hard -- if not
programming languages
A few people recently pointed out that my personal branding isn't everything that it could be. Joseph Cooney even took matters into his own hands. Well, I contacted the big man himself, Steve McConnell, and he graciously provided me a high resolution vector file of the original Coding
programming languages
Brad Abrams was a founding member of the .NET common language runtime team way back in 1998. He's also the co-author of many essential books on .NET, including both volumes of the .NET Framework Standard Library Annotated Reference. I was at a presentation Brad gave to the Triangle
programming languages
Scott Hanselman was kind enough to sing the praises of my blog [http://www.hanselman.com/blog/RerediscoveringJeffAtwood.aspx] a few months ago, completely unprompted. I finally met Scott in person at TechEd this year, and I can assure you that if you suck, Scott will be the first person
programming languages
Jonathan Edwards' Manifesto of the Programmer Liberation Front [http://alarmingdevelopment.org/index.php?p=5] is an inspiring call to arms for programmers who are fed up with the status quo of Java and C#. Maybe it is time to open your window, stick your head out and yell,
programming languages
Brendan Kidwell noted something interesting about the comments on Trackpoint versus Touchpad: You know, I just realized that there is a lot of LOVE and HATE going on, and it doesn't seem to be very unified. Software development is basically a religion. It's not surprising that