programming languages

c programming

Die, You Gravy Sucking Pig Dog!

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[] b1

By Jeff Atwood ·
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Overnight Success: It Takes Years

programming languages

Overnight Success: It Takes Years

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.

By Jeff Atwood ·
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Programming: Love It or Leave It

programming languages

Programming: Love It or Leave It

In a recent Joel on Software forum post Thinking of Leaving the Industry, one programmer wonders if software development is the right career choice in the face of broad economic uncertainty: After reading the disgruntled posts here from long time programmers and hearing so much about ageism and outsourcing, I’

By Jeff Atwood ·
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asp.net

My Scaling Hero

Inspiration for Stack Overflow occasionally comes from the unlikeliest places. Have you ever heard of the dating website, Plenty of Fish? Markus Frind built the Plenty of Fish Web site in 2003 as nothing more than an exercise to help teach himself a new programming language, ASP.NET. The site

By Jeff Atwood ·
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We Are Typists First, Programmers Second

software development concepts

We Are Typists First, Programmers Second

Remember last week when I said coding was just writing? I was wrong. As one commenter noted, it’s even simpler than that. [This] reminds me of a true “Dilbert moment” a few years ago, when my (obviously non-technical) boss commented that he never understood why it took months to

By Jeff Atwood ·
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programming languages

You’re Reading The World’s Most Dangerous Programming Blog

Have you ever noticed that blogs are full of misinformation and lies? In particular, I’m referring to this blog. The one you’re reading right now. For example, yesterday’s post was so bad that it is conclusive proof that I’ve jumped the shark. Again. Apparently, according to

By Jeff Atwood ·
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Obscenity Filters: Bad Idea, or Incredibly Intercoursing Bad Idea?

programming languages

Obscenity Filters: Bad Idea, or Incredibly Intercoursing Bad Idea?

I’m not a huge fan of The Daily WTF for reasons I’ve previously outlined. There is, however, the occasional gem – such as this one posted by ezrec: Browsing through a web archive of some old computer club conversations, I ran across this sentence: “Apple made the clbuttic mistake

By Jeff Atwood ·
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programming languages

Programming Is Hard, Let’s Go Shopping!

A few months ago, Dare Obasanjo noticed a brief exchange my friend Jon Galloway and I had on Twitter. Unfortunately, Twitter makes it unusually difficult to follow conversations, but Dare outlines the gist of it in Developers, Using Libraries is not a Sign of Weakness: The problem Jeff was trying

By Jeff Atwood ·
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Spawning a New Process

programming languages

Spawning a New Process

I don’t usually talk about my personal life here, but I have to make an exception in this case. I debated for days which geeky reference I would use as a synonym for “we’re having a baby.” The title is the best I could do. I’m truly

By Jeff Atwood ·
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Deadlocked!

multi-threading

Deadlocked!

You may have noticed that my posting frequency has declined over the last three weeks. That’s because I’ve been busy building that Stack Overflow thing we talked about. It’s going well so far. Joel Spolsky also seems to think it’s going well, but he’s one

By Jeff Atwood ·
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Secrets of the JavaScript Ninjas

javascript

Secrets of the JavaScript Ninjas

One of the early technology decisions we made on Stack Overflow was to go with a fairly JavaScript intensive site. Like many programmers, I’ve been historically ambivalent about JavaScript: * The Power of “View Source” * The Day Performance Didn’t Matter Any More * JavaScript and HTML: Forgiveness by Default * JavaScript:

By Jeff Atwood ·
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Alpha, Beta, and Sometimes Gamma

software development concepts

Alpha, Beta, and Sometimes Gamma

As we begin the private beta for Stack Overflow later this week, I wondered: where do the software terms alpha and beta come from? And why don’t we ever use gamma? Alpha and Beta are the first two characters of the Greek alphabet. Presumably these characters were chosen because

By Jeff Atwood ·
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