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

It Made Sense in 1978

Whenever I see this list of memory cell sizes, it strikes me as antiquated: Those names were standard for both the Intel x86 and Motorola 68000 families of processors, and it's easy to see where they came from. "Word" isn't synonymous with a 16-bit value; it refers to the fundamental data size that a computer architecture is built to operate upon. On a 16-bit CPU like the 8086, a word is naturally 16-bits.

Now it's 2010, and it's silly to think of a 16-bit value as a basic enough unit of data to get to the designation "word." "Long" is similarly out of place, as 32-bit microprocessors have been around for over 25 years, and yet the standard memory cell size is still labeled in a way that makes it sound abnormally large.

The PowerPC folks got this right back in the early 1990s with this nomenclature: That made sense in 1991, and it's still rational today. (64-bit is now common, but the jump isn't nearly as critical as it was the last time memory cell size doubled. The PowerPC name for "64-bits" is "doubleword.")

Occasionally you need to reevaluate your assumptions and not just cling to something because it's always been that way.

Previously

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