I've been designing and programming video games since the 1980s, doing things that seem baroquely hardcore in retrospect, like writing Super Nintendo games entirely in assembly language. I also have an interest in very high-level languages and have been programming in Erlang since 1999. Go figure.

james.hague @ google mail

• Programming as if Performance Mattered (2004)
• Halcyon Days: Interviews with Classic Computer and Video Game Programmers (1997, 2002)

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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: The "* 1024" is so common, and so clunky in comparison with: In Forth this is trivial to add, at least outside of compiled definitions. All you need is: And then you can write:

Previously

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