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A Short Quiz About Language Design

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - May 11, 2013

Suppose you’re designing a programming language. What syntax would you use for a string constant? This isn’t a trick; it’s as simple as that. If you want to print Hello World then how do you specify a basic string like that in your language? I’ll…

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Implementation of “Don’t Lose Your ets Tables”

Steve Vinoski - steve - May 09, 2013

A couple years ago I wrote about how to avoid losing your ets tables if the Erlang processes that own those tables crash. The original post resulted from accidentally losing an ets table full of video subscriber data during a debug session on a live…

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Dynamo Sure Works Hard

Damien Katz - Damien Katz - May 03, 2013

We tend to think of working hard as a good thing. We value a strong work ethic and determination is the face of adversity. But if you are working harder than you should to get the same results, then it’s not a virtue, it’s a…

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Remembering a Failed Revolution

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - April 21, 2013

Twenty-three years ago, a book by Edward Cohen called Programming in the 1990s: An Introduction to the Calculation of Programs was published. It was a glimpse into the sparkling software development world of the future, a time when ad hoc coding would be supplanted by…

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Deal of the Day – Half off Erlang and OTP in Action

Erlware - Eric B Merritt - April 16, 2013

A

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Exploring the Lower Depths of Terseness

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - April 08, 2013

There’s a 100+ year old system for recording everything that happens in a baseball game. It uses sheet of paper with a small box for each batter. Whether that batter gets to base or is out—and why—gets coded into that box. It’s a scorekeeping method…

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Expertise, the Death of Fun, and What to Do About It

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - March 12, 2013

I’ve started writing this twice before. The first time it turned into Simplicity is Wonderful, But Not a Requirement. The second time it ended up as Don’t Be Distracted by Superior Technology. If you re-read those you might see bits and pieces of what I’ve…

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Don’t Be Distracted by Superior Technology

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - March 03, 2013

Not long after I first learned C, I stumbled across a lesser-used language called Modula-2. It was designed by Niklaus Wirth who previously created Pascal. While Pascal was routinely put down for being awkwardly restrictive, Wirth nudged and reshaped the language into Modula-2, arguably the…

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Simplicity is Wonderful, But Not a Requirement

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - February 24, 2013

Whenever I write about the overwhelming behind-the-scenes complexity of modern systems, and the developer frustration that comes with it, I get mail from computer science students asking “Am I studying the right field? Should I switch to something else?” It seems somewhere between daunting and…

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2013 Erlang Workshop Call For Papers

Steve Vinoski - steve - February 20, 2013

The Twelfth ACM SIGPLAN Erlang Workshop will take place on September 28, 2013, in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. See the call for papers for more details. It’s a satellite event of the 18th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP), September 25–27, 2013. http://www.icfpconference.org/icfp2013/. The…

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