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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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Collapsing Communities

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

At one time the Lisp and Forth communities were exciting places. Books and articles brimmed with optimism. People were creating things with those languages. And then slowly, slowly, there was a loss of vibrancy. Perhaps the extent of the loss went unnoticed by people inside…

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8-Bit Scheme: A Revisionist History

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

In The Nostalgia Trap I wrote, “I was in contact with a hundred or more designers of 8-bit computer games, and I learned their stories.” Those stories were fantastically interesting, but most of them were only incidentally about programming. The programming side usually went like…

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The End is Near for Vertical Tab

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

Stop the Vertical Tab Madness wasn’t based on a long-standing personal peeve. It dawned on me after writing Rethinking Programming Language Tutorials and a follow-up piece that here is this archaic escape sequence (“v”) that no one uses or understands, yet it’s mindlessly included in…

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The Nostalgia Trap

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

I used to maintain a site about 8-bit game programmers and the games they created. To be fair, I still update the “database” now and then, but changes are few and far between, and I stopped posting news blurbs five years ago. There’s a huge…

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Living in the Era of Infinite Computing Power

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - June 26, 2011

Basic math used to be slow. To loop 10K times on an 8-bit processor, it was faster to iterate 256 times in an inner loop, then wrap that in an outer loop executing 40 times. That avoided multi-instruction 16-bit addition and comparison each time through.…

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Tough Love for Indies

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - June 20, 2011

At one time I was the independent software developer’s dream customer. I was a pushover. I bought applications, I bought tools, I bought games. This was back when “shareware” was still legitimate, back before the iPhone App Store made five dollars sound like an outrageous…

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Constantly Create

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - May 22, 2011

When I wrote Flickr as a Business Simulator, I was thinking purely about making a product—photos—and getting immediate feedback from a real audience. Seeing how much effort it takes to build-up a following. Learning if what you think people will like and what they actually…

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Impressed by Slow Code

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - April 30, 2011

At one time I was interested in—even enthralled by—low-level optimization. Beautiful and clever tricks abound. Got a function call followed by a return statement? Replace the pair with a single jump instruction. Once you’ve realized that “load effective address” operations are actually doing math, then…

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