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Eleven Years of Erlang

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - March 10, 2010

I’ve written about how I started using Erlang. A good question is why, after eleven years, am I still using it? For the record, I do use other languages. I enjoy writing Python code, and I’ve taught other people how to use Python. This website …

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It Made Sense in 1978

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - March 04, 2010

Whenever I see this list of memory cell sizes, it strikes me as antiquated: BYTE = 8 bits WORD = 16 bits LONG = 32 bits Those names were standard for both the Intel x86 and Motorola 68000 families of processors, and it’s easy to …

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Dehumidifiers, Gravy, and Coding

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - March 03, 2010

For a few months I did freelance humor writing. Greeting cards, cartoon captions, that sort of thing. My sole income was from the following slogan, which ended up on a button: Once I’ve gathered enough information for the almighty Zontaar, I’m outta here! Sitting down …

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Optimizing for Fan Noise

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - February 10, 2010

The first money I ever earned, outside of getting an allowance, was writing assembly language games for an 8-bit home computer magazine called ANALOG Computing. Those games ended up as pages of printed listings of lines like this: 1050 DATA 4CBC08A6A4BC7D09A20986B7B980 0995E895D4B99E099DC91C9DB51CA90095C0C8 CA10E8A20086A88E7D1D8E7E,608 A typical …

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What to do About Erlang’s Records?

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - January 30, 2010

The second most common complaint about Erlang, right after confusion about commas and semicolons as separators, is about records. Gotta give those complainers some credit, because they’ve got taste. Statically defined records are out of place in a highly dynamic language. There have been various …

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Nothing Like a Little Bit of Magic

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

Like so many other people, I was enthralled by the iPad introduction. I haven’t held or even seen an iPad in person yet, but that video hit me on a number of levels. It’s a combination of brand new hardware—almost dramatically so—and uses for it …

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Flickr as a Business Simulator

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - January 25, 2010

Flickr came along exactly when I needed it. In 2004, I knew I was too immersed in technical subjects, and Flickr motivated me to get back into photography as a change of pace. I loved taking photos when I was in college (mostly of the …

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No Comment

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - January 16, 2010

I received a few emails after last time along the lines of “Oh. Perl. Homebrew CMS. That’s why you don’t allow people to post comments. Well, no, but it was definitely a conscious decision. The Web 2.0 answer is that I’m outsourcing comments to reddit …

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The Recovering Programmer

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

I wrote the first draft of this in 2007, and I thought the title would be the name of my blog. But I realized I had a backlog of more tech-heavy topics that I wanted to get out of my system. I think I’ve finally …

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Follow-up to “Functional Programming Doesn’t Work”

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - December 30, 2009

Not surprisingly, Functional Programming Doesn’t Work (and what to do about it) started some lively discussion. There were two interesting “you’re crazy” camps: The first mistakenly thought that I was proposing fixing problems via a judicious use of randomly updated global variables, so every program …

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