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Digging Out from Years of Homogeneous Computing

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - September 27, 2012

When I first started looking into functional programming languages, one phrase that I kept seeing in discussions was As Fast as C. A popular theory was that functional programming was failing to catch on primarily because of performance issues. If only implementations of Haskell, ML,…

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What’s Your Hidden Agenda?

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - September 25, 2012

In July 1997, the Issaquah Press printed an article with the headline “Man Shoots Computer in Frustration.” Now realize that Issaquah is just south of Redmond, so it’s not surprising that this story was picked up nationally. It rapidly became a fun to cite piece…

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Minimalism in an Age of Tremendous Hardware

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - September 18, 2012

You don’t know minimalism until you’ve explored the history of the Forth programming language. During Forth’s heyday, it was unremarkable for a full development environment—the entire language with extensions, assembler, and integrated editor—to be less than 16K of object code. That’s not 16K of data…

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The Goal is to be Like a Bad Hacker Movie

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - September 11, 2012

The typical Hollywood hacking scene is an amalgamation of familiar elements: screens full of rapidly changing hex digits, database searches that show each fingerprint or image as it’s encountered, password prompts in a 72 point font, dozens of windows containing graphs and random data…oh, and…

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Hopefully More Controversial Programming Opinions

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

I read 20 Controversial Programming Opinions, and I found myself nodding “yes, yes get to the interesting stuff.” And then, after “less code is better than more,” it was over. It was like reading a list of controversial health tips that included “eat your veggies”…

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All that Stand Between You and a Successful Project are 500 Experiments

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

Suppose there was a profession called “maker.” What does a maker do? A maker makes things! Dinner. Birdhouses. Pants. Shopping malls. Camera lenses. Jet engines. Hydroelectric power stations. Pianos. Mars landers. Being a maker is a rough business. It’s such a wide-ranging field, and just…

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One Small, Arbitrary Change and It’s a Whole New World

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - August 18, 2012

I want to take one item from Things to Optimize Besides Speed and Memory and run with it: optimizing the number of disk sector writes. This isn’t based on performance issues or the limited number of write cycles for solid-state drives. It’s an arbitrary thought…

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App Store Failure and Personal Responsibility

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - August 11, 2012

“I wrote an iPhone app, and it didn’t make any money” is a growing literary genre, and I sympathize with the authors. I really do. Building any kind of non-trivial, commercial application takes an immense amount of work that combines coding, writing, interaction design, and…

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Things to Optimize Besides Speed and Memory

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - July 12, 2012

Whittling down a function to accomplish the same result with fewer instructions is, unfortunately, fun. It’s a mind teaser in the same way that crossword puzzles and Sudoku are. Yet it’s a waste of time to finely hone a C++ routine that would be more…

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I Am Not a Corporation

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

In 2009, when I exclusively used a fancy Nikon DSLR, my photographic work flow was this: take pictures during the day, transfer them to a PC in the evening, fiddle with the raw version of each shot in an image editor, save out a full-res…

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