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Write Code Like You Just Learned How to Program

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - December 24, 2010

I’m reading Do More Faster, which is more than a bit of an advertisement for the TechStars start-up incubator, but it’s a good read nonetheless. What struck me is that several of the people who went through the program, successfully enough to at least get…

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Instant-On

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - December 19, 2010

“Mobile” is the popular term used to describe devices like the iPhone and iPad. I prefer “instant-on.” Sure, they are mobile, but what makes them useful is that you can just turn them on and start working. All the usual baggage associated with starting-up a…

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Learning to Ignore Superficially Ugly Code

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - December 12, 2010

Back when I was in school and Pascal was the required language for programming assignments, I ran across a book by Henry Ledgard: Professional Pascal. Think of it as the 1980s version of Code Complete. This was my first exposure to concerns of code layout,…

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Good-Bye to the Sprawling Suburbs of Screen Space

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - November 25, 2010

Application platforms are going off in two completely different directions. Desktop monitors keep getting bigger—using two or three monitors at once isn’t the rarity that it once was—and then there’s the ultra-portable end of things: iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, Nintendo DS. The common reaction to this…

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Easy to Please

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - November 20, 2010

I have favorited over seven thousand photos on Flickr. “Favoriting” is not a valuable currency. Clicking the “Add to Faves” icon means I like a photo, I’m inspired by it, and I want to let the photographer know this. Doing so doesn’t cost me anything,…

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This Isn’t Another Quick Dismissal of Visual Programming

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - October 25, 2010

I stopped following technical forums for three reasons: pervasive negativity, waning interest on my part, and I realized I could predict the responses to most questions. “I bet this devolves into a debate about the validity of the singleton pattern.” *click* “Ha! I knew it!…

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A Concurrent Language for Non-Concurrent Software

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - October 17, 2010

Occasionally I get asked why, as someone who uses Erlang extensively, do I rarely talk about concurrency? The answer is because concurrency is not my primary motivation for using Erlang. Processes themselves are wonderful, and I often use them as a way to improve modularity.…

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Advice to Aimless, Excited Programmers

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - September 23, 2010

I occasionally see messages like this from aimless, excited programmers: Hey everyone! I just learned Erlang/Haskell/Python, and now I’m looking for a big project to write in it. If you’ve got ideas, let me know! or I love Linux and open source and want to…

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Erlang vs. Unintentionally Purely Functional Python

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - September 16, 2010

Here’s a little Python function that should be easy to figure out, even if you don’t know Python: def make_filename(path): return path.lower() + ".jpg" I want to walk through what’s going on behind the scenes when this function executes. There is, of course, a whole…

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Common Sense, Part 1

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - August 31, 2010

There’s a photo of mine in the September 2010 issue of Popular Photography. I’m excited about it; my photo credits are few and far between, and it brings back the feelings I had when I wrote for magazines long ago. Completely ignoring the subject of…

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