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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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The Highest-Level Feature of C

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - February 14, 2013

At first blush this is going to sound ridiculous, but bear with me: the highest-level feature of C is the switch statement. As any good low-level language should be, C is designed for transparent compilation. If you take a bit of C source, the corresponding…

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Sympathy for Students in Beginning Programming Classes

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - January 27, 2013

Here’s a template for a first programming class: Use a book with a language name in the title. Start with the very basics like formatted output and simple math. Track through more language features with each chapter and assignment, until at the end of the…

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Trapped by Exposure to Pre-Existing Ideas

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - January 23, 2013

Let’s go back to the early days of video games. I don’t mean warm and fuzzy memories of the Nintendo Entertainment System on a summer evening, but all the way back to the early 1970s when video games first started to exist as a consumer…

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An Irrational Fear of Files on the Desktop

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - January 20, 2013

A sign of the clueless computer user has long been saving all files directly to the desktop. You can spot this from across the room, the background image peeking through a grid of icons. Well-intentioned advice of “Here, let me show you how to make…

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Development Methodologies?

Damien Katz - Damien Katz - January 18, 2013

Hi Damien, ... If I were to list projects as small, medium, and large or small to enterprise, what methodologies work across them? My thoughts are Agile works well, but eventually you’ll hit a wall of complexity, which will make you wonder why you didn’t…

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Follow up to “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C”

Damien Katz - Damien Katz - January 17, 2013

My post The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C generated a ton discussion on Reddit and Hacker News, nearly 1200 comments combined as people got in to all sorts of heated arguments. I also got a bunch of private correspondence about it. So I’m going to answer…

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The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

Damien Katz - Damien Katz - January 08, 2013

For years I’ve tried my damnedest to get away from C. Too simple, too many details to manage, too old and crufty, too low level. I’ve had intense and torrid love affairs with Java, C++, and Erlang. I’ve built things I’m proud of with all…

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2012 Retrospective

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - January 06, 2013

A short summary of 2012: more entries than any previous year by far (41 vs. 33 in 2010), and a site design that finally doesn’t look so homemade. And a tremendous increase in traffic. It’s not the numbers of network packets flying around that matter.…

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Documenting the Undocumentable

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - December 29, 2012

Not too long ago, any substantial commercial software came in a substantial box filled with hundreds or thousands of printed pages of introductory and reference material, often in multiple volumes. Over time the paper manuals became less comprehensive, leaving only key pieces of documentation in…

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