programming languages
What’s the difference between a programming language and a scripting language? Is there even a difference at all? Larry Wall’s epic Programming is Hard, Let’s Go Scripting attempts to survey the scripting landscape and identify commonalities. When you go out to so-called primitive tribes and analyze their
programming languages
In my previous post, a commenter asked this question: So many of the best minds I have met in computing have a love for music. Is it something to do with being able to see beauty in complex numerical systems? I adore music. I have a vast music collection and
programming languages
Alan Kay is one of my computing heroes. All this stuff we do every day as programmers? Kay had a hand in inventing a huge swath of it: Computer scientist Kay was the leader of the group that invented object-oriented programming, the graphical user interface, 3D computer graphics, and ARPANET,
c programming
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
programming languages
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.
programming languages
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’
asp.net
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
software development concepts
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
programming languages
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
programming languages
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
programming languages
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
programming languages
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