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An Irrational Fear of Files on the Desktop

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - January 20, 2013

A sign of the clueless computer user has long been saving all files directly to the desktop. You can spot this from across the room, the background image peeking through a grid of icons. Well-intentioned advice of “Here, let me show you how to make…

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2012 Retrospective

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - January 06, 2013

A short summary of 2012: more entries than any previous year by far (41 vs. 33 in 2010), and a site design that finally doesn’t look so homemade. And a tremendous increase in traffic. It’s not the numbers of network packets flying around that matter.…

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Documenting the Undocumentable

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - December 29, 2012

Not too long ago, any substantial commercial software came in a substantial box filled with hundreds or thousands of printed pages of introductory and reference material, often in multiple volumes. Over time the paper manuals became less comprehensive, leaving only key pieces of documentation in…

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Dangling by a Trivial Feature

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

I’m looking for a good vector-illustration app and download a likely candidate. I rely on knowing the position of the cursor on the page—strangely, some programs won’t show this—so it’s a good first sign to see coordinates displayed at the top of the screen. Now…

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The UNIX Philosophy and a Fear of Pixels

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - December 09, 2012

I’ve finally crossed the line from mild discomfort with people who espouse the UNIX way as the pinnacle of computing to total befuddlement that there’s anyone who still wants to argue such a position. One key plank in the UNIX party platform is that small…

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“Not Invented Here” Versus Developer Sanity

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

Developers, working independently, are all pushing to advance the state of the art, to try to make things better. The combined effect is to make things more chaotic and frustrating in the short term. Early PC video cards rapidly advanced from bizarrely hued CGA modes…

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An Outrageous Port

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - November 26, 2012

In You, Too, Can Be on the Cutting Edge of Functional Programming Research I wrote: As an experiment, I decided to port an action game that I wrote in [1996 and] 1997 to mostly-pure Erlang. It wasn’t a toy, but a full-featured game chock full…

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OOP Isn’t a Fundamental Particle of Computing

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - November 13, 2012

The biggest change in programming over the last twenty-five years is that today you manipulate a set of useful, flexible data types, and twenty-five years ago you spent a disproportionately high amount of time building those data types yourself. C and Pascal—the standard languages of…

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The Background Noise Was Louder than I Realized

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

A few years ago I started cutting back on the number of technology and programming sites I read. It was never a great number, and now it’s only a handful. This had nothing to with being burned out on technology and programming; it was about…

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Do You Really Want to be Doing this When You’re 50?

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

When I was still a professional programmer, my office-mate once asked out of the blue, “Do you really want to be doing this kind of work when you’re fifty?” I have to say that made me stop and think. To me, there’s an innate frustration…

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