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The World’s Most Mind-Bending Language Has the Best Development Environment

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - August 24, 2009

I highly recommend that all programmers learn J. I doubt most will end up using it for daily work, but the process of learning it will stick with you. J is so completely different from everything else out there, and all your knowledge of C++…

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A Personal History of Compilation Speed, Part 2

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - August 22, 2009

(Read Part 1 if you missed it.) My experience with IBM Pascal, on an original model dual-floppy IBM PC, went like this: I wrote a small “Hello World!” type of program, saved it, and fired up the compiler. It churned away for a bit, writing…

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The Pure Tech Side is the Dark Side

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - August 08, 2009

When I was writing 8-games, I was thrilled to receive each issue of the home computer magazines I subscribed to (especially this one).  I spent my time designing games in my head and learning how to make the hardware turn them into reality.  Then each…

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A Personal History of Compilation Speed, Part 1

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - August 02, 2009

The first compiled language I used was the Assembler Editor cartridge for the Atari 8-bit computers.  Really, it had the awful name “Assembler Editor.” I expect some pedantic folks want to interject that at an assembler is not a compiler.  At one time I would…

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Want People to Use Your Language Under Windows?  Do This.

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - July 28, 2009

Whenever I hear about a new programming language or new implementation of an existing language, I usually find myself trying it out.  There’s a steep cost—in terms of time and effort—in deciding to use a new language for more than just tinkering, so I’m not…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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