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The Silent Majority of Experts

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - June 21, 2012

When I still followed the Usenet group comp.lang.forth, I wasn’t the only person frustrated by the lack of people doing interesting things with the language. Elizabeth Rather, co-founder of Forth, Inc., offered the following explanation: there are people solving real problems with Forth, but they…

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Your Coding Philosophies are Irrelevant

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - June 14, 2012

I’ll assume you’ve got a set of strongly-held beliefs about software development. This is a safe bet; anyone who writes code has some personal mantras and peeves. Maybe you think that PHP is a broken mess or that Perl is unmaintainable? Maybe you’re quick to…

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Another Programming Idiom You’ve Never Heard Of

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - June 06, 2012

Even new programmers quickly pick-up how array indexing works. You fetch an element like this: array[3]. (More experienced folks can amuse themselves with the equally valid 3[array] in C.) Now here’s a thought: what if you could fetch multiple values at the same time and…

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The Pace of Technology is Slower than You Think

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - June 02, 2012

“That post is OLD! It’s from 2006!” The implication is that articles on technology have a shelf-life, that writings on programming and design and human factors quickly lose relevance. Here’s a reminder that the pace of technological advancement isn’t as out of control as it…

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We Who Value Simplicity Have Built Incomprehensible Machines

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

The 8086 “AAA” instruction seemed like a good idea at the time. In the 1970s there was still a case to be made for operating on binary-coded decimal values, with two digits per byte. What’s the advantage of BCD? Large values can be easily displayed…

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You, Too, Can Be on the Cutting Edge of Functional Programming Research

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - May 08, 2012

In 1999 I earned $200 writing an essay titled Toward Programmer Interactivity: Writing Games in Modern Programming Languages. It was an early, optimistic exploration of writing commercial games in Haskell, ML, and Lisp. It was not a good article. It’s empty in the way that…

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The Most Important Decisions are Non-Technical

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - May 06, 2012

I occasionally get puzzled questions about a parenthetical remark I made in 2010: that I no longer program for a living. It’s true. I haven’t been a full-time programmer since 2003. The short version of these questions is “Why?” The longer version is “Wait, you’ve…

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A Forgotten Principle of Compiler Design

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

That a clean system for separately compiled modules appeared in Modula-2, a programming language designed by Niklaus Wirth in 1978, but not in the 2011 C++ standard…hmmm, no further comment needed. But the successor to Modula-2, Oberon, is even more interesting. With Oberon, Wirth removed…

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Can You Be Your Own Producer?

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - April 22, 2012

I’ve worked on personal projects where I went badly off track and didn’t realize it until much later. What I needed was someone to nudge me in the right direction, someone to objectively point out the bad decisions I was making. What I needed was…

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Use and Abuse of Garbage Collected Languages

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - April 21, 2012

The garbage collection vs. manual memory management debates ended years ago. As with the high-level vs. assembly language debates which came before them, it’s hard to argue in favor of tedious bookkeeping when there’s an automatic solution. Now we use Python, Ruby, Java, Javascript, Erlang,…

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