Programming
in the 21st
Century
in the 21st
Century
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your own ideas.
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I'm a recovering programmer who has been designing video games since the 1980s, doing things that seem baroquely hardcore in retrospect, like writing Super Nintendo games entirely in assembly language. These days I use whatever tools are the most fun and give me the biggest advantage. Since 1999 one of those tools has been Erlang.
james.hague @ google mail
Worth a read: Programming as if Performance Mattered
Kilobyte Constants, a Simple and Beautiful Idea that Hasn't Caught On
Eric Isaacson's A86 assembler (which I used regularly in the early 1990s) includes a great little feature that I've never seen in another language: the suffix "K" to indicate kilobytes in numeric literals. For example, you can say "16K" instead of "16384". How many times have you seen C code like this:char Buffer[512 * 1024];
The "* 1024" is so common, and so clunky in comparison with:
char Buffer[512K];
In Forth this is trivial to add, at least outside of compiled definitions. All you need is:
: K 1024 * ;
And then you can write:
512 K allot
Previously
Functional Programming Went Mainstream Years AgoWant 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