programming languages
I apologize for the scarcity of updates lately. There have been two things in the way: 1. Continuing fallout from International Backup Awareness Day, which meant all updates to Coding Horror from that point onward were hand-edited text files. Which, believe me, isn't nearly as sexy as it
programming languages
Let's face it: we all write bad code. But not every programmer does something about the bad code they're polluting the world with, day in and day out. There's a whole universe of possibilities: * Follow the instructions on the paint can * Become a software
regex
Among programmers of any experience, it is generally regarded as A Bad Ideatm to attempt to parse HTML with regular expressions. How bad of an idea? It apparently drove one Stack Overflow user to the brink of madness: You can't parse [X]HTML with regex. Because HTML can&
programming languages
Ever have one of those days where everything you check into source control is wrong? Also, how exactly is that day is different from any other? But seriously. Code that is visible is code that can be wrong. No surprise there. But did you know that even the code you
software development concepts
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
programming languages
Links are the fundamental building blocks of the web [https://blog.codinghorror.com/dont-click-here-the-art-of-hyperlinking/]. And every time I click on one, I can't help recalling the odd visionary who came up with the original idea of clickable links in text, aka hypertext [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext]
programming languages
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
microsoft bob
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
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&
programming languages
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
programming languages
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
programming languages
Are you familiar with the term "meta"? It permeates many concepts in programming, from metadata to the <meta> tag. But since we're on a blog, let's use blogging to explain what meta means. If you've read this blog for any