programming languages
I saw on reddit that today, January 10th, is Donald Knuth’s seventieth birthday. Knuth is arguably the most famous living computer scientist, author of the seminal Art of Computer Programming series. Here’s how serious Mr. Knuth is – his books are dedicated, not to his wife or a loved
programming languages
Leon recently posted a link to a great blog entry on rediscovering Logo. You know, Logo – the one with the turtle. I remember being exposed to Logo way back in high school. All I recall about Logo is the turtle graphics, and the primitive digital Etch-a-Sketch drawings you could create
programming languages
Steve Yegge’s latest, Code’s Worst Enemy, is like all of his posts: rich, rewarding, and ridiculously freaking long. Steve doesn’t write often, but when he does, it’s a doozy. As I mentioned a year ago, I’ve started a cottage industry mining Steve’s insanely great
perl
In The Problems of Perl: The Future of Bugzilla, Max Kanat-Alexander* laments the state of the Bugzilla codebase: Once upon a time, Bugzilla was an internal application at Netscape, written in TCL. When it was open-sourced in 1998, Terry (the original programmer), decided to re-write Bugzilla in Perl. My understanding
programming languages
In a recent web search, I found the following comment in a programming.reddit.com thread from eight months ago, completely by accident: I think prog.reddit will continue to move in phases... a couple of days ago, someone complained about a drop-off in Haskell articles, today there were 4
sorting algorithms
The default sort functions in almost every programming language are poorly suited for human consumption. What do I mean by that? Well, consider the difference between sorting filenames in Windows explorer, and sorting those very same filenames via Array.Sort() code: Explorer shell sortArray.Sort() Quite a difference. I can
programming languages
In case you hadn’t noticed, it’s that time of year again: let the wholesale buying of crap begin! As a technology enthusiast with a bad impulse purchase habit, I get a lot of complaints that I am difficult to buy for. That’s sort of intentional. I spent
algorithms
In my previous post on shuffling, I glossed over something very important. The very first thing that came to mind for a shuffle algorithm is this: for (int i = 0; i < cards.Length; i++) { int n = rand.Next(cards.Length); Swap(ref cards[i], ref cards[n]); } It’s
programming languages
Earlier this week I wrote about The Two Types of Programmers. Based on the huge number of comments, it seemed to strike a nerve. Or two. This surprised me, because it was never meant to be the inflammatory, provocative diatribe that many people interpreted it as. It got so out
programming languages
Contrary to myth, there aren’t fourteen types of programmers. There are really only two, as Ben Collins-Sussman reminds us. There are two “classes” of programmers in the world of software development: I’m going to call them the 20% and the 80%. The 20% folks are what many would
programming languages
Reginald Braithwaite writes consistently great stuff on his blog, but I think my absolute favorite thing he’s ever written is We Have Lost Control of the Apparatus. But we programmers have lost and we must be realistic about things. The fact of the matter is this: people own their
software development concepts
Does this sound familiar? your program (n): a maze of non-sequiturs littered with clever-clever tricks and irrelevant comments. Compare MY PROGRAM. my program (n): a gem of algorithmic precision, offering the most sublime balance between compact, efficient coding on the one hand, and fully commented legibility for posterity on the