programming in the
twenty-first century

It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.

2017

So Long, Prog21

2016

Writing Video Games in a Functional Style Progress Bars are Surprisingly Difficult Learning to Program Without Writing the Usual Sort of Code Picturing WebSocket Protocol Packets Being More Than "Just the Programmer"The New Minimalism Optimizing for Human Understanding Fun vs. Computer Science Evolution of an Erlang Style Death of a Language Dilettante Moving Beyond the OOP Obsession On the Madness of Optimizing Compilers Messy Structs/Classes in a Functional Style What's Your Secondary Language?

2015

The Same User Interface Mistakes Over and Over Alternate Retrocomputing Histories What Can You Put in a Refrigerator?The Right Thing?Computer Science Courses that Don't Exist, But Should If You Haven't Done It Before, All Bets Are Off Why Doesn't Creativity Matter in Tech Recruiting?Reconsidering Functional Programming The Wrong Kind of Paranoia Are You Sure?Life is More Than a Series of Cache Misses Retiring Python as a Teaching Language The Software Developer's Sketchbook

2014

Programming Modern Systems Like It Was 1984 Extreme Formatting Design is Expensive Lost Lessons from 8-Bit BASIC You Can't Sit on the Sidelines and Become a Philosopher Unexpectedly Simple Programming Without Being Obsessed With Programming You Don't Read Code, You Explore It Get Good at Idea Generation Range-Checks and Recklessness Popular iOS Games That Could Have Been Designed for 8-Bit Systems You Don't Want to Think Like a Programmer A Worst Case for Functional Programming?Success Beyond the Barrier of Full Understanding

2013

Optimization in the Twenty-First Century Self-Imposed Complexity C is Lower Level Than You Think Three Years in an Alternate Universe What Are You The World's Foremost Authority Of?Dynamic Everything Else Why Do Dedicated Game Consoles Exist?Purely Functional Photoshop How much memory does malloc(0) allocate?Getting Past the Cloning Instinct Organizational Skills Beat Algorithmic Wizardry Tips for Writing Functional Programming Tutorials Getting Comfortable with the Softer Side of Development Flickr's Redesign is a Series of Evolutionary Changes Stumbling Into the Cold Expanse of Real Programming A Short Quiz About Language Design Remembering a Revolution That Never Happened Exploring the Lower Depths of Terseness Expertise, the Death of Fun, and What to Do About It Don't Be Distracted by Superior Technology Simplicity is Wonderful, But Not a Requirement The Highest-Level Feature of C Sympathy for Students in Beginning Programming Classes Trapped by Exposure to Pre-Existing Ideas An Irrational Fear of Files on the Desktop 2012 Retrospective

2012

Documenting the Undocumentable Dangling by a Trivial Feature The UNIX Philosophy and a Fear of Pixels "Not Invented Here" Versus Developer Sanity An Outrageous Port OOP Isn't a Fundamental Particle of Computing The Background Noise Was Louder than I Realized Do You Really Want to be Doing This When You're 50?Digging Out from Years of Homogeneous Computing What's Your Hidden Agenda?Minimalism in an Age of Tremendous Hardware The Goal is to be Like a Bad Hacker Movie Hopefully More Controversial Programming Opinions All that Stand Between You and a Successful Project are 500 Experiments One Small, Arbitrary Change and It's a Whole New World App Store Failure and Personal Responsibility Things to Optimize Besides Speed and Memory I Am Not a Corporation The Silent Majority of Experts Your Coding Philosophies are Irrelevant Another Programming Idiom You've Never Heard Of The Pace of Technology is Slower than You Think We Who Value Simplicity Have Built Incomprehensible Machines You, Too, Can Be on the Cutting Edge of Functional Programming Research The Most Important Decisions are Non-Technical A Forgotten Principle of Compiler Design Can You Be Your Own Producer?Use and Abuse of Garbage Collected Languages 100,000 Lines of Assembly Language This is Why You Spent All that Time Learning to Program Turning Your Code Inside Out Solving the Wrong Problem A Complete Understanding is No Longer Possible Don't Fall in Love With Your Technology A Peek Inside the Erlang Compiler Four Levels of Idea Theft Pretend This Optimization Doesn't Exist Virtual Joysticks and Other Comfortably Poor Solutions Recovering From a Computer Science Education Follow-up to "A Programming Idiom You've Never Heard Of"A Programming Idiom You've Never Heard Of

2011

2011 Retrospective User Experience Intrusions in iOS 5 Photography as a Non-Technical Hobby Adventures in Unfiltered Global Publishing Things That Turbo Pascal is Smaller Than Starting in the Middle Papers from the Lost Culture of Array Languages The Revolution is Personal Optimization on a Galactic Scale Greetings from the Bottom of the Benchmarks Beyond Empty Coding Boldness and Restraint Building Beautiful Apps from Ugly Code It's Like That Because It Has Always Been Like That "Avoid Premature Optimization" Does Not Mean "Write Dumb Code"Collapsing Communities 8-Bit Scheme: A Revisionist History The End is Near for Vertical Tab The Nostalgia Trap Living in the Era of Infinite Computing Power Tough Love for Indies Constantly Create Impressed by Slow Code Follow the Vibrancy Revisiting "Tricky When You Least Expect It"Caught-Up with 20 Years of UI Criticism If You're Not Gonna Use It, Why Are You Building It?Don't Distract New Programmers with OOP Exploring Audio Files with Erlang Accidental Innovation, Part 3 Accidental Innovation, Part 2 Accidental Innovation, Part 1

2010

A Three-Year Retrospective Write Code Like You Just Learned How to Program Instant-On Learning to Ignore Superficially Ugly Code Good-Bye to the Sprawling Suburbs of Screen Space Easy to Please This Isn't Another Quick Dismissal of Visual Programming A Concurrent Language for Non-Concurrent Software Advice to Aimless, Excited Programmers Erlang vs. Unintentionally Purely Functional Python Common Sense, Part 1 Personal Programming Stop the Vertical Tab Madness One Small Step Toward Reducing Programming Language Complexity Free Your Technical Aesthetic from the 1970s Explaining Functional Programming to Eight-Year-Olds What Do People Like?Tricky When You Least Expect It A Ramble Through Erlang IO Lists How to Think Like a Pioneer How Much Processing Power Does it Take to be Fast?Rethinking Programming Language Tutorials Living Inside Your Own Black Box A Short Story About Verbosity Eleven Years of Erlang It Made Sense in 1978 Dehumidifiers, Gravy, and Coding Optimizing for Fan Noise What to do About Erlang's Records?Nothing Like a Little Bit of Magic Flickr as a Business Simulator No Comment The Recovering Programmer

2009

Follow-up to "Functional Programming Doesn't Work"Functional Programming Doesn't Work (and what to do about it)How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Erlang's Process Dictionary Slow Languages Battle Across Time How Did Things Ever Get This Good?Tales of a Former Disassembly Addict Micro-Build Systems and the Death of a Prominent DSL The World's Most Mind-Bending Language Has the Best Development Environment A Personal History of Compilation Speed, Part 2 The Pure Tech Side is the Dark Side A Personal History of Compilation Speed, Part 1 Want People to Use Your Language Under Windows? Do This.How to Crash Erlang Digging Deeper into Sufficiently Smartness Let's Take a Trivial Problem and Make it Hard On Being Sufficiently Smart How My Brain Kept Me from Co-Founding YouTube Puzzle Languages Revisiting "Purely Functional Retrogames"

2008

Accidentally Introducing Side Effects into Purely Functional Code Timidity Does Not Convince Macho Programming Understanding What It's Like to Program in Forth Kilobyte Constants, a Simple and Beautiful Idea that Hasn't Caught On Functional Programming Went Mainstream Years Ago Want to Write a Compiler? Just Read These Two Papers.A Spellchecker Used to Be a Major Feat of Software Engineering Coding as Performance Don't Be Afraid of Special Cases Purely Functional Retrogames, Part 4 Purely Functional Retrogames, Part 3 Purely Functional Retrogames, Part 2 Purely Functional Retrogames, Part 1 My Road to Erlang Slumming with BASIC Programmers In Praise of Non-Alphanumeric Identifiers Five Memorable Books About Programming Back to the Basics of Functional Programming Don't Structure Data All The Way Down Garbage Collection in Erlang Why Garbage Collection Paranoia is Still (sometimes) Justified

2007

Functional Programming Archaeology Would You Bet $100,000,000 on Your Pet Programming Language?Timings and the Punchline Revisiting "Programming as if Performance Mattered"Finally: Data Structure Constants in Erlang Two Stories of Simplicity Deriving Forth Trapped! Inside a Recursive Data Structure Sending Modern Languages Back to 1980s Game Programmers Erlang as a Target for Imperative DSLs Follow-up to "Admitting that Functional Programming Can Be Awkward"Admitting that Functional Programming Can Be Awkward On the Perils of Benchmarking Erlang A Deeper Look at Tail Recursion in Erlang

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I'm James Hague, a recovering programmer who has been designing video games since the 1980s. Programming Without Being Obsessed With Programming and Organizational Skills Beat Algorithmic Wizardry are good starting points. For the older stuff, try the 2012 Retrospective.

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