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Pretend This Optimization Doesn’t Exist

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - January 31, 2012

In any modern discussion of algorithms, there’s mention of being cache-friendly, of organizing data in a way that’s a good match for the memory architectures of CPUs. There’s an inevitable attempt at making the concepts concrete with a benchmark manipulating huge—1000x1000—matrices. When rows are organized…

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Virtual Joysticks and Comfortably Poor Solutions

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - January 23, 2012

Considering that every video game system ever made shipped with a physical joystick or joypad, the smooth, featureless glass of mobile touchscreens was unnerving. How to design a control scheme when there is no controller? One option was to completely dodge the issue, and that…

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Recovering From a Computer Science Education

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - January 15, 2012

I was originally going to call this “Undoing the Damage of a Computer Science Education,” but that was too link-baity and too extreme. There’s real value in a computer science degree. For starters, you can easily get a good paying job. More importantly, you’ve gained…

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Follow-up to “A Programming Idiom You’ve Never Heard Of”

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - January 05, 2012

Lots of mail, lots of online discussion about A Programming Idiom You’ve Never Heard Of, so I wanted to clarify a few things. What I was trying to do was get across the unexpected strangeness of function inverses in a programming language. In that short…

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A Programming Idiom You’ve Never Heard Of

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - January 03, 2012

Here are some sequences of events: Take the rake out of the shed, use it to pile up the leaves in the backyard, then put the rake back in the shed. Fly to Seattle, see the sights, then fly home. Put the key in the…

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2011 Retrospective

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - December 31, 2011

I was going to end this blog one year ago. Prog21 was entirely a personal outlet for the more technical ideas kicking around in my head, and it had run its course. Just before Christmas 2010, I sat down and wrote a final “thanks for…

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User Experience Intrusions in iOS 5

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - December 30, 2011

The iPhone has obsoleted a number of physical gadgets. A little four-track recorder that I use as a notebook for song ideas. A stopwatch. A graphing calculator. Those ten dollar LCD games from Toys ‘R Us. And it works because an iPhone app takes over…

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Photography as a Non-Technical Hobby

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - November 27, 2011

When I got into photography in 2004, I approached it differently from the more technical endeavors I’ve been involved in. It was a conscious decision, not an accident. I’d been overexposed to years of bickering about computer hardware, programming languages, you name it. All the…

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Adventures in Unfiltered Global Publishing

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - November 09, 2011

I remember sitting in my parents’ backyard in Texas, in the mid 1980s, reading a computer magazine that contained a game and accompanying article I had written. I don’t know what the circulation of the magazine—Antic—was, but it was popular enough that I could walk…

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Things That Turbo Pascal is Smaller Than

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - October 30, 2011

Turbo Pascal 3 for MS-DOS was released in September 1986. Being version 3, there were lesser releases prior to it and flashier ones after, but 3 was a solid representation of the Turbo Pascal experience: a full Pascal compiler, including extensions that it made it…

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