RSS

Recent news

Common Sense, Part 1

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - August 31, 2010

There’s a photo of mine in the September 2010 issue of Popular Photography. I’m excited about it; my photo credits are few and far between, and it brings back the feelings I had when I wrote for magazines long ago. Completely ignoring the subject of…

More (0 comments)

Personal Programming

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - August 28, 2010

I’ve mentioned before that this site is generated by a small Perl script. How small? Exactly 6838 bytes, which includes comments and an HTML template. Mentioning Perl may horrify you if you came here to read about Erlang, but it’s a good match for the…

More (0 comments)

Stop the Vertical Tab Madness

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - July 29, 2010

In One Small Step Toward Reducing Programming Language Complexity I added “Who even knows what “v” (vertical tab) does?” as an off the cuff comment. Re-reading that made me realize something that’s blatantly obvious in retrospect, so obvious that I’ve gone all this time without…

More (0 comments)

One Small Step Toward Reducing Programming Language Complexity

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - July 24, 2010

I’ve taught Python a couple of times. Something that experience made clear to me is just how many concepts and features there are, even in a language designed to be simple. I kept finding myself saying “Oh, and there’s one more thing…” Take something that…

More (1 comments)

Free Your Technical Aesthetic from the 1970s

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - July 17, 2010

In the early 1990s, I used Unix professionally for a few years. It wasn’t the official Unix, nor was it Linux, but Sun’s variant called SunOS. By “used” I mean I wrote commercial, embedded software entirely a Unix environment. I edited 10,000+ line files in…

More (1 comments)

Explaining Functional Programming to Eight-Year-Olds

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - July 09, 2010

“Map” and “fold” are two fundamentals of functional programming. One of them is trivially easy to understand and use. The other is not, but that has more to do with trying to fit it into a particular view of functional programming than with it actually…

More (2 comments)

What Do People Like?

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - July 01, 2010

I wrote Flickr as a Business Simulator in earnest, but I think it was interpreted more as a theoretical piece. When you build something with the eventual goal of releasing it to the world, the key question is “Will people like this?” And, really, you…

More (0 comments)

Tricky When You Least Expect It

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - June 29, 2010

Here’s a problem: You’ve got a satellite dish that can be rotated to any absolute angle from 0 to 360 degrees. If you think of the dish as being attached to a pole sticking out of the ground, that’s what the dish rotates around. Given…

More (0 comments)

A Ramble Through Erlang IO Lists

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - June 13, 2010

The IO List is a handy data type in Erlang, but not one that’s not often discussed in tutorials. It’s any binary. Or any list containing integers between 0 and 255. Or any arbitrarily nested list containing either of those two things. Like this: [10,…

More (1 comments)

How to Think Like a Pioneer

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - May 13, 2010

Here’s an experiment to try at home: do a Google image search for “integrated development environment.” Take some time to go through the first several pages of pictures. Even if you had no idea what an IDE was, the patterns are obvious. There’s a big…

More (3 comments)

 1 2 3 >  Last »