programming in the
twenty-first century

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

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

popular

on creativity

others that I like

Erlang

retro

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

archives

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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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