programming languages
O'Reilly's History of Programming Languages poster is fascinating reading. If you trace programming languages back to their origins, you'll find that we've been at this programming stuff a long, long time. * Fortran (1954) * Cobol (1959) * Lisp (1958) * Basic (1964) * Forth (1970) * Pascal
software development concepts
Laptop magazine's Attack of the 20-inch Notebook is a tongue-in-cheek look at using the Dell XPS M2010 as a portable system in a few different locations. Hilarity ensued. For context, here are the relevant specs of this semi-portable concept system: * 20" LCD * full-size bluetooth keyboard (with numeric
programming languages
When you're starting out as a technical blogger, you'll inevitably stumble across Joel on Software [http://www.joelonsoftware.com/]. He's been blogging since the year 2000, when computers were hand-carved of wood and the internet transmitted data via carrier pigeon. He has his own
programming languages
Brian Kuhn recently described the real risk of technocentrism. [..] people use (or have rejected) particular operating systems, tools, and software that has in turn shaped their perceptions when it comes to making judgments on the various merits of particular technologies. People tend to categorize or identify themselves with particular "
software development
Nathan Myhrvold [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Myhrvold], the former CTO of Microsoft, is also a bona-fide physicist. He holds physics degress from UCAL and Princeton. He even had a postdoctoral fellowship under the famous Stephen Hawking. Thus, as you might expect, his 1997 ACM keynote presentation, The Next
game development
Greg Costikyan's essay Welcome Comrade! [http://www.manifestogames.com/node/1425] is a call to arms for hobbyist game programmers: > Back in the day, it took a couple of man days to create a Doom level. Creating a Doom III level took multiple man-weeks. Thus budgets spiral
hardware
With the release of Intel's Core Duo and Core Duo 2 chips, it's finally happened-- mainstream video card GPUs are about to overtake CPUs as the largest consumers of power inside your PC. Witness this chart, derived from XBit labs' latest roundup [http://www.xbitlabs.
javascript
The 1996 JavaWorld article Is JavaScript here to stay? is almost amusing in retrospect. John Lam recently observed that JavaScript is the world's most ubiquitous computing runtime. I think the answer is an emphatic yes. JavaScript is currently undergoing a renaissance through AJAX. Sure, the AJAX-ified clones of
open source
Here's Scott Hanselman [http://www.hanselman.com/blog/SandcastleMicrosoftCTPOfAHelpCHMFileGeneratorOnTheTailsOfTheDeathOfNDoc.aspx] on the death of nDoc [http://www.charliedigital.com/PermaLink,guid,95b2ab68-ba92-413a-b758-2783cde5df9c.aspx] : > We are blessed. This Open Source stuff is free. But it's free like a puppy. It takes years of care and feeding.
programming languages
Stiff recently asked a few programmers a series of open-ended questions: * How did you learn programming? Were schools of any use? * What's the most important skill every programmer should have? * Are math and physics important skills for a programmer? * What will be the next big thing in computer
unit testing
J. Timothy King has a nice piece on the twelve benefits of writing unit tests first. Unfortunately, he seriously undermines his message by ending with this: However, if you are one of the [coders who won't give up code-first], one of those curmudgeon coders who would rather be
programming languages
Scott Hanselman was kind enough to sing the praises of my blog [http://www.hanselman.com/blog/RerediscoveringJeffAtwood.aspx] a few months ago, completely unprompted. I finally met Scott in person at TechEd this year, and I can assure you that if you suck, Scott will be the first person