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Explaining Functional Programming to Eight-Year-Olds

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - July 09, 2010

“Map” and “fold” are two fundamentals of functional programming. One of them is trivially easy to understand and use. The other is not, but that has more to do with trying to fit it into a particular view of functional programming than with it actually…

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What Do People Like?

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

I wrote Flickr as a Business Simulator in earnest, but I think it was interpreted more as a theoretical piece. When you build something with the eventual goal of releasing it to the world, the key question is “Will people like this?” And, really, you…

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Tricky When You Least Expect It

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

Here’s a problem: You’ve got a satellite dish that can be rotated to any absolute angle from 0 to 360 degrees. If you think of the dish as being attached to a pole sticking out of the ground, that’s what the dish rotates around. Given…

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A Ramble Through Erlang IO Lists

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - June 13, 2010

The IO List is a handy data type in Erlang, but not one that’s not often discussed in tutorials. It’s any binary. Or any list containing integers between 0 and 255. Or any arbitrarily nested list containing either of those two things. Like this: [10,…

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How to Think Like a Pioneer

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - May 13, 2010

Here’s an experiment to try at home: do a Google image search for “integrated development environment.” Take some time to go through the first several pages of pictures. Even if you had no idea what an IDE was, the patterns are obvious. There’s a big…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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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