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Revisiting “Tricky When You Least Expect It”

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - April 15, 2011

Since writing Tricky When You Least Expect It in June 2010, I’ve gotten a number of responses offering better solutions to the angle_diff problem. The final version I presented in the original article was this: angle_diff(Begin, End) -> D = End - Begin, DA =…

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Caught-Up on 20 Years of UI Criticism

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - April 11, 2011

Interaction designers have leveled some harsh criticisms at the GUI status-quo over the last 20+ years. The mouse is an inefficient input device. The desktop metaphor is awkward and misguided. Users shouldn’t be exposed to low-level details like the raw file-system and having to save…

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If You’re Not Gonna Use It, Why Are You Building It?

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

Just about every image editing or photo editing program I’ve tried has a big collection of visual filters. There’s one to make an image look like a mosaic, one to make it look like watercolors, and so on. Except for few of the most fundamental…

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Don’t Distract New Programmers with OOP

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - March 16, 2011

When I get asked “What’s a good first programming language to teach my [son / daughter / other-person-with-no-programming-experience]” my answer has been the same for the last 5+ years: Python. That may be unexpected, coming from someone who often talks about non-mainstream languages, but I…

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Exploring Audio Files with Erlang

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - March 12, 2011

It takes surprisingly little Erlang code to dig into the contents of an uncompressed audio file. And it turns out that three of the most common uncompressed audio file formats—WAV, AIFF, and Apple’s CAF—all follow the same general structure. Once you understand the basics of…

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Accidental Innovation, Part 3

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - March 09, 2011

I didn’t write the previous two installments so I could build up my ego. I wanted to give concrete examples of innovation and the circumstances surrounding it, to show that it’s not magic or glamorous, to show that innovation is more than sitting down and…

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Accidental Innovation, Part 2

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - March 01, 2011

In 1995 I was writing a book, a collection of interviews with people who wrote video and computer games in the 1980s. I had the inside track on the whereabouts of many of those game designers—this was before they were easy to find via Google—and…

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Accidental Innovation, Part 1

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - February 19, 2011

In the mid-1980s I was writing 8-bit computer games. Looking back, it was the epitome of indie. I came up with the idea, worked out the design, drew the art, wrote the code, made the sound effects, all without any kind of collaboration or outside…

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A Three-Year Retrospective

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - December 29, 2010

This is not a comprehensive index, but a categorization of some of the more interesting or well-received entries from November 2007 through December 2010. Feel free to dig through the archives if you want everything. Items within each section are in chronological order. Popular: Admitting…

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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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