Recent news

How Much Processing Power Does it Take to be Fast?

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

First, watch this. It’s Defender, an arcade game released thirty years ago. I went out of my way to find footage running on the original hardware, not emulated on a modern computer. (There’s clearer video from an emulator if you prefer.) Here’s the first point…

More (1 comments)

Rethinking Programming Language Tutorials

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

Imagine you’ve never programmed before, and the first language you’re learning is Lua. Why not start with the official book about Lua? Not too far in you run across this paragraph: The table type implements associative arrays. An associative array is an array that can…

More (4 comments)

Living Inside Your Own Black Box

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - March 23, 2010

Every so often I run across a lament that programmers no longer understand the systems they work on, that programming has turned into searches through massive quantities of documentation, that large applications are built by stacking together loosely defined libraries. Most recently it was Mike…

More (0 comments)

A Short Story About Verbosity

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

In the early 2000s I was writing a book. I don’t mean in the vague sense of sitting in a coffeeshop with my laptop and pretending to be a writer; I had a contract with a tech book publisher. I’m in full agreement with the…

More (1 comments)

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…

More (2 comments)

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…

More (4 comments)

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…

More (0 comments)

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…

More (1 comments)

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…

More (2 comments)

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…

More (3 comments)

 <  1 2 3 4 >  Last »