Recent news

How to Crash Erlang

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - June 15, 2009

Now that’s a loaded title, and I know some people will immediately see it as a personal slam on Erlang or ammunition for berating the language in various forums.  I mean neither of these.  Crashing a particular language, even so-called safe interpreted implementations, is not…

More (0 comments)

Digging Deeper into Sufficiently Smartness

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - June 14, 2009

(If you haven’t read On Being Sufficiently Smart, go ahead and do so, otherwise this short note won’t have any context.) I frequently write Erlang code that builds a list which ends up backward, so I call lists:reverse at the very end to flip it…

More (0 comments)

Let’s Take a Trivial Problem and Make it Hard

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - May 04, 2009

Here’s a simple problem:  Given a block of binary data, count the frequency of the bytes within it.  In C, this could be a homework assignment for an introductory class.  Just zero out an array of 256 elements, then for each byte increment the appropriate…

More (4 comments)

On Being Sufficiently Smart

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - April 18, 2009

I’m proud to have created the wiki page for the phrase sufficiently smart compiler back in 2003 or 2004.  Not because it’s a particularly good page, mind you; it has been endlessly rewritten in standard wiki fashion.  It’s one of the few cases where I…

More (0 comments)

How My Brain Kept Me from Co-Founding YouTube

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - April 07, 2009

Flickr blew my mind when it appeared back in 2004. I’d read all the articles about building web pages that load quickly: crunching down the HTML, hand-tweaking GIFs, clever reuse of images.  I was immersed in the late 1990s culture of website optimization.  Then here…

More (4 comments)

Puzzle Languages

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - February 07, 2009

I know I’ve covered this before.  I am repeating myself.  But it was woven into various other topics, never stated outright: Some programming languages, especially among those which haven’t gained great popularity, are puzzles. That’s not to be confused with “programming in general is a…

More (0 comments)

Revisiting “Purely Functional Retrogames”

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - January 04, 2009

I wrote the Purely Functional Retrogames series as an experiment.  There’s been so much empty talk about how functional languages are as good or better than imperative languages—yet very little to back that up.  Doubly so in regard to interactive applications.  I’d bet there are…

More (2 comments)

Accidentally Introducing Side Effects into Purely Functional Code

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - December 14, 2008

It’s easy to taint even purely functional languages by reintroducing side-effects.  Simply have each function take an additional parameter representing the global state of the world—a tree of key/value pairs, for example—and have each function return a new state of the world.  This is not…

More (4 comments)

Timidity Does Not Convince

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - November 30, 2008

The only arguments that hold water, in terms of programming language suitability, are bold, finished projects.  Not a mini-Emacs written in Haskell.  Not a Sudoku solver in Prolog.  Not a rewrite of some 1970s video game using Functional Reactive Programming.  They need to be large…

More (0 comments)

Macho Programming

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - August 30, 2008

Back before I completely lost interest in debates about programming topics, I remember reading an online discussion that went like this: Raving Zealot: Garbage collection is FASTER than manual memory management! Experienced Programmer: You mean that garbage collection is faster than using malloc and free…

More (0 comments)

« First  <  12 13 14