programming languages
A few months ago, Dare Obasanjo noticed a brief exchange my friend Jon Galloway [http://twitter.com/jongalloway] 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 [http:
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
multi-threading
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,
javascript
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:
software development concepts
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
c#
Although I love strings, sometimes the String class can break your heart. For example, in C#, there is no String.Left() function. Fair enough; we can roll up our sleeves and write our own function lickety-split: public static string Left(string s, int len) { if (len == 0 || s.Length == 0)
programming languages
As I grow older and wisereven older as a programmer, I've found that my personal coding style has trended heavily toward minimalism. I was pleased, then, to find many of the coding conventions I've settled on over the last 20 years codified in Spartan programming. No,
regular expressions
I love regular expressions. No, I'm not sure you understand: I really love regular expressions. You may find it a little odd that a hack who grew up using a language with the ain't keyword would fall so head over heels in love with something as
programming languages
As programmers, we deal with a lot of unusual keyboard characters that typical users rarely need to type, much less think about: $ # % {} * [] ~ & <> Even the characters that are fairly regularly used in everyday writing -- such as the humble dash, parens, period, and question mark -- have radically
ruby
I have decidedly mixed feelings about the book Beautiful Code, but one of the better chapters is Tim Bray's "Finding Things". In it, he outlines the creation of a small Ruby program: counts = {} counts.default = 0 ARGF.each_line do |line| if line =~ %r{GET /ongoing/
programming languages
What do you think the single greatest invention in computer science is? Besides the computer itself, I mean. Seriously, before reading any further, pause here for a moment and consider the question. I've talked before about how young so-called modern computer programming languages really are, and it bears
programming languages
I seldom pause to answer criticism of my blog. If I did, I'd have time for little else in the course of the day, and no time for constructive work. But occasionally I'll encounter a particularly well written critique that gives me pause, such as Alastair