programming languages

The Interview With The Programmer

software development concepts

The Interview With The Programmer

If the internet has perfected anything, it’s the art of the crappy, phoned-in, half-assed email “interview.” For all those who have bemoaned the often pathetic state of internet journalism, when it comes to interviews, you’re largely correct. The purpose of most of these interviews is quick and dirty

By Jeff Atwood ·
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The Xanadu Dream

programming languages

The Xanadu Dream

Xanadu, a global hypertext publishing system, is the longest-running vaporware story in the history of the computer industry. It has been in development for more than 30 years. This long gestation period may not put it in the same category as the Great Wall of China, which was under construction

By Jeff Atwood ·
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Have You Met Your Dog, Patches?

programming languages

Have You Met Your Dog, Patches?

The Gamasutra article Dirty Coding Tricks is a fantastic read. One part of it in particular rang true for me. Consider the load of pain I found myself in when working on a conversion of a 3D third person shooter from the PC to the original PlayStation. Now, the PS1

By Jeff Atwood ·
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The Only Truly Failed Project

microsoft bob

The Only Truly Failed Project

Do you remember Microsoft Bob? If you do, you probably remember it as an intensely marketed but laughable failure – what some call the “number one flop” at Microsoft. There’s no question that Microsoft Bob was nothing short of an unmitigated disaster. But that’s the funny thing about failures

By Jeff Atwood ·
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web programming

All Programming is Web Programming

Michael Braude decries the popularity of web programming: The reason most people want to program for the web is that they’re not smart enough to do anything else. They don’t understand compilers, concurrency, 3D or class inheritance. They haven’t got a clue why I’d use an

By Jeff Atwood ·
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programming languages

COBOL: Everywhere and Nowhere

I’d like to talk to you about ducts. Wait a minute. Strike that. I meant COBOL. The Common Business Oriented Language is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary as the language that is everywhere and nowhere at once: As a result, today COBOL is everywhere, yet is largely unheard of among

By Jeff Atwood ·
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The Paper Data Storage Option

programming languages

The Paper Data Storage Option

As programmers, we regularly work with text encodings. But there’s another sort of encoding at work here, one we process so often and so rapidly that it’s invisible to us, and we forget about it. I’m talking about visual encoding – translating the visual glyphs of the alphabet

By Jeff Atwood ·
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programming languages

Code: It’s Trivial

Remember that Stack Overflow thing we’ve been working on? Some commenters on a recent Hacker News article questioned the pricing of Stack Exchange – essentially, a hosted Stack Overflow: Seems really pricey for a relatively simple software like this. Someone write an open source alternative? it looks like something that

By Jeff Atwood ·
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programming languages

All Abstractions Are Failed Abstractions

In programming, abstractions are powerful things: Joel Spolsky has an article in which he states All non-trivial abstractions, to some degree, are leaky. This is overly dogmatic - for example, bignum classes are exactly the same regardless of the native integer multiplication. Ignoring that, this statement is essentially true, but

By Jeff Atwood ·
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Regular Expressions for Regular Programmers

programming languages

Regular Expressions for Regular Programmers

If you’ve followed my blog for any length of time, you know that I am a total regular expression fanboy. It’s almost embarrassing how much I love the damn things. I’m pretty sure my teammates roll their eyes every time they see yet another class I’ve

By Jeff Atwood ·
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Server Fault: Calling All Lusers

programming languages

Server Fault: Calling All Lusers

It’s pop quiz time! Put away your notes, and let’s begin. a) Do you own this book?* b) Do you know who this man is? c) Does this FAQ look familiar to you? 3) OUR LITTLE FRIEND, THE COMPUTER 3.1) Are there any OSes that don’t

By Jeff Atwood ·
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