ruby
Steve Yegge's whirlwind language tour is, as he points out, neither good nor complete, which makes it one of the best blog posts I've read this year. I'll spoil the ending for you: according to Steve, Ruby combines the best features of Perl, Smalltalk,
programming languages
Inspired by my recent post on C# code snippets, I found a little console app by Francesco Balena* that enumerates all the snippets on your system along with their shortcut text. I improved his console app and turned it into a convenient IDE macro along the lines of my keyboard
programming languages
I have nothing against World of Warcraft, but the Gamasutra editorial World of Warcraft Teaches the Wrong Things [https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/130976/soapbox_world_of_warcraft_teaches_.php] highlights one problem I have with the entire MMORPG [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMORPG]* genre: > [WOW teaches
markup languages
Black and white works fine when I'm reading newspapers. But when I'm reading computer languages of any kind-- from Perl to SQL, from C# to Regular Expressions, from HTML to XML -- I can't bear to read them in black and white any more.
programming languages
The archetypal Hello World program [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hello_world_program] has always had a calming effect on developers. It's been a programming staple for decades: > [Hello World] is typically one of the simplest programs possible in a computer language. Some, however, are surprisingly complex,
programming languages
OSNews published a nine-language performance roundup [http://osnews.com/story.php?news_id=5602&page=3] in early 2004. The results are summarized here: intlongdoubletrigI/OVisual C++9.618.86.43.510.548.8Visual C#9.723.917.74.19.9 65.3gcc C9.828.89.514.910.073.
programming languages
Have you ever worked with developers that were charter members of the third-party-control-of-the-month club? You know the kind-- they never met a third party control they didn't like. They spend all day trolling downloads and experimenting with every tool listed on The Daily Grind. Which means deploying your
programming languages
When I read Wesner Moise's post on Asperger's Syndrome [http://wesnerm.blogs.com/net_undocumented/2003/09/asperger_syndro.html], I wasn't surprised. Many of the best software developers I've known share some of the traits associated with Asperger's Syndrome
.net
I just updated my post The Bloated World of Managed Code with baseline memory footprints for Console and Winforms apps in .NET 2.0. I'll admit I am a bit of a hypocrite when it comes to managed code apps. Now that tiny, native BitTorrent clients are available
programming languages
Laurent Bourgeois sent in an amusing link to the story of SkiFree [http://ski.ihoc.net/] in the words of Chris Pirih, the original Microsoft programmer who wrote it: > I wrote SkiFree in C on my home computer, entirely for my own education and entertainment. One day while I
programming languages
[http://www.clive.nl/detail/24424/] The 1978 BASIC program Animal [http://www.atariarchives.org/basicgames/showpage.php?page=4] is an animal-specific variation of twenty questions [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty_questions]. You think of an animal, and the computer tries to guess what animal you're
retro gaming
I sometimes go by the handle "Wumpus" online. It's part of my personal brand [https://blog.codinghorror.com/your-personal-brand/], just like Coding Horror is [https://blog.codinghorror.com/on-the-meaning-of-coding-horror/]. Why? It was one of my formative computing experiences on the first "real" computer I