So Long, Prog21

I always intended "Programming in the 21st Century" to have a limited run. I knew since the Recovering Programmer entry from January 1, 2010, that I needed to end it. It just took a while.

And now, an explanation.

I started this blog to talk about issues tangentially related to programming, about soft topics like creativity and inspiration and how code is a medium for implementing creative visions. Instead I worked through more technical topics that I'd been kicking around over the years. That was fun! Purely Functional Retrogames is something I would have loved to read in 1998. More than once I've googled around and ended up back at one of my essays.

As I started shifting gears and getting back toward what I originally wanted to do, there was one thing that kept bothering me: the word programming in the title.

I don't think of myself as a programmer. I write code, and I often enjoy it when I do, but that term programmer is both limiting and distracting. I don't want to program for its own sake, not being interested in the overall experience of what I'm creating. If I start thinking too much about programming as a distinct entity then I lose sight of that. Now that I've exhausted what I wanted to write about, I can clear those topics out of my head and focus more on using technology to make fun things.

Thanks for reading!

It's hard to sum up 200+ articles, but here's a start. This is not even close to a full index. See the archives if you want everything. (There are some odd bits in there.)

widely linked

• Things That Turbo Pascal is Smaller Than
• Do You Really Want to be Doing This When You're 50?
• Organizational Skills Beat Algorithmic Wizardry
• Retiring Python as a Teaching Language
• Computer Science Courses that Don't Exist, But Should

popular

• Five Memorable Books About Programming
• A Spellchecker Used to Be a Major Feat of Software Engineering
• Want to Write a Compiler? Just Read These Two Papers.
• On Being Sufficiently Smart
• Optimizing for Fan Noise
• Free Your Technical Aesthetic from the 1970s
• Advice to Aimless, Excited Programmers
• Write Code Like You Just Learned How to Program
• Don't Distract New Programmers with OOP
• Recovering From a Computer Science Education
• Don't Fall in Love With Your Technology
• A Complete Understanding is No Longer Possible
• Solving the Wrong Problem
• This is Why You Spent All that Time Learning to Program
• We Who Value Simplicity Have Built Incomprehensible Machines
• Your Coding Philosophies are Irrelevant
• The Silent Majority of Experts
• Hopefully More Controversial Programming Opinions
• How much memory does malloc(0) allocate?

on creativity

• The Pure Tech Side is the Dark Side
• Flickr as a Business Simulator
• How to Think Like a Pioneer
• What Do People Like?
• Accidental Innovation, Part 1
• If You're Not Gonna Use It, Why Are You Building It?
• It's Like That Because It Has Always Been Like That
• Trapped by Exposure to Pre-Existing Ideas
• Get Good at Idea Generation
• You Can't Sit on the Sidelines and Become a Philosopher
• The Software Developer's Sketchbook
• Design is Expensive
• Why Doesn't Creativity Matter in Tech Recruiting?

others that I like

• Deriving Forth
• Tales of a Former Disassembly Addict
• Living Inside Your Own Black Box
• Tricky When You Least Expect It
• The Most Important Decisions are Non-Technical
• Things to Optimize Besides Speed and Memory
• All that Stand Between You and a Successful Project are 500 Experiments
• The UNIX Philosophy and a Fear of Pixels
• Dangling by a Trivial Feature
• Documenting the Undocumentable
• You Don't Want to Think Like a Programmer
• You Don't Read Code, You Explore It
• If You Haven't Done It Before, All Bets Are Off
• What Can You Put in a Refrigerator?
• The Same User Interface Mistakes Over and Over
• Fun vs. Computer Science

Erlang

• A Deeper Look at Tail Recursion in Erlang
• My Road to Erlang
• Garbage Collection in Erlang
• How to Crash Erlang
• Eleven Years of Erlang
• A Ramble Through Erlang IO Lists
• A Concurrent Language for Non-Concurrent Software
• A Peek Inside the Erlang Compiler
• Evolution of an Erlang Style

retro

• A Personal History of Compilation Speed
• Slow Languages Battle Across Time
• How Much Processing Power Does it Take to be Fast?
• 8-Bit Scheme: A Revisionist History
• Stumbling Into the Cold Expanse of Real Programming
• Why Do Dedicated Game Consoles Exist?
• Lost Lessons from 8-Bit BASIC
• Programming Modern Systems Like It Was 1984

Also see the previous entry for all of the functional programming articles.

Programming as if Performance Mattered is something I wrote in 2004 which used to be linked from every prog21 entry.

permalink January 4, 2017

previously

• 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"

archives

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