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, but he’s one
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: Forgiveness by Default * JavaScript:
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 because
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 wiser even 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, not
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 obtuse and
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 different meaning
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/When/dddx/(dddd/
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 repeating
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 Rankine’s
programming languages
I can’t remember when, exactly, I discovered Clay Shirky, but I suspect it was around 2003 or so. I sent him an email about micropayments, he actually answered it, and we had a rather nice discussion on the topic. I’ve been a fan of Clay’s writing ever
php
Here’s a list of every function beginning with the letter “A” in the PHP function index: abs() acos() acosh() addcslashes() addslashes() aggregate() aggregate_info() aggregate_methods() aggregate_methods_by_list() aggregate_methods_by_regexp() aggregate_properties() aggregate_properties_by_list() aggregate_properties_by_regexp() aggregation_info() apache_child_terminate(