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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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Personal Programming

Programming in the 21st Century - James Hague - August 28, 2010

I’ve mentioned before that this site is generated by a small Perl script. How small? Exactly 6838 bytes, which includes comments and an HTML template. Mentioning Perl may horrify you if you came here to read about Erlang, but it’s a good match for the…

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Stop the Vertical Tab Madness

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

In One Small Step Toward Reducing Programming Language Complexity I added “Who even knows what “v” (vertical tab) does?” as an off the cuff comment. Re-reading that made me realize something that’s blatantly obvious in retrospect, so obvious that I’ve gone all this time without…

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One Small Step Toward Reducing Programming Language Complexity

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

I’ve taught Python a couple of times. Something that experience made clear to me is just how many concepts and features there are, even in a language designed to be simple. I kept finding myself saying “Oh, and there’s one more thing…” Take something that…

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Free Your Technical Aesthetic from the 1970s

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

In the early 1990s, I used Unix professionally for a few years. It wasn’t the official Unix, nor was it Linux, but Sun’s variant called SunOS. By “used” I mean I wrote commercial, embedded software entirely a Unix environment. I edited 10,000+ line files in…

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