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Starting in the Middle

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - October 24, 2011

When I start on a personal project, I’m bright-eyed and optimistic. I’ve got an idea in my head, and all I need to do is implement it. Wait, before I can begin working on the good stuff there are some foundational underpinnings that don’t yet…

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Papers from the Lost Culture of Array Languages

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - October 17, 2011

2012 is the 50th anniversary of Ken Iverson’s A Programming Language, which described the notation that became APL (even though a machine executable version of APL didn’t exist yet). Since then there’s been APL2, Nial, A+, K, Q, and other array-oriented languages. Iverson (1920-2004) teamed…

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The Revolution is Personal

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - October 16, 2011

If you were going to reinvent the music / film / video game industry, what would you do? Articles deriding the state of modern music, et al, are staples of the web. They’re light and fun to read, and snickering at the antics of a…

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Optimization on a Galactic Scale

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - October 08, 2011

The code to generate this site has gotten bloated. When I first wrote about it, the Perl script was 6838 bytes. Now it’s grown to a horrific 7672 bytes. Part of the increase is because the HTML template is right there in the code, so…

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Greetings from the Bottom of the Benchmarks

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - October 04, 2011

I can guarantee that if you write a benchmark pitting Erlang’s dictionary type against that of any other language, Erlang is going to lose. Horribly. It doesn’t matter if you use choose the dict module or gb_trees; Erlang will still have an embarrassing time of…

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Beyond Empty Coding

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

There’s a culture of cloning and copying that I have a hard time relating to. I taught myself to program so I could create things of my own design—originally 8-bit video games. There’s an engineering side to that, of course, and learning how to better…

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Boldness and Restraint

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - September 13, 2011

Modern mobile devices are hardly the bastions of minimalism once synonymous with embedded systems. They’re driven by bold technical decisions. Full multi-core 32-bit processors. Accelerated 3D graphics all the way down, including shader support. No whooshing fans or hot to the touch parts. Big, UNIX-like…

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Building Beautiful Apps from Ugly Code

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - September 08, 2011

I wish I could entirely blame my computer science degree for undermining my sense of aesthetics, but I can’t. Much of it was self-inflicted from being too immersed in programming and technology for its own sake, and it took me a long time to recover.…

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It’s Like That Because It Has Always Been Like That

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - August 25, 2011

At a time when most computers could only display phosphorescent screens of text, the first GUI calculator app was a bold experiment. It looked like an honest-to-goodness pocket calculator. No instruction manual necessary; click on keys with the mouse. And that it could be opened…

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“Avoid Premature Optimization” Does Not Mean “Write Dumb Code”

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - August 17, 2011

First there’s a flurry of blog entries citing a snippet of a Knuth quote: “premature optimization is the root of all evil.” Then there’s the backlash about how performance needs to be considered up front, that optimization isn’t something that can be patched in at…

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