A Three-Year Retrospective

This is not a comprehensive index, but a categorization of some of the more interesting or well-received entries from November 2007 through December 2010. Feel free to dig through the archives if you want everything. Items within each section are in chronological order.

popular

• Admitting that Functional Programming Can Be Awkward
• Sending Modern Languages Back to 1980s Game Programmers
• Why Garbage Collection Paranoia is Still (sometimes) Justified
• Garbage Collection in Erlang
• Five Memorable Books About Programming
• Purely Functional Retrogames
• A Spellchecker Used to Be a Major Feat of Software Engineering
• Want to Write a Compiler? Just Read These Two Papers.
• Puzzle Languages
• The World's Most Mind-Bending Language Has the Best Development Environment
• Optimizing for Fan Noise
• How Much Processing Power Does it Take to be Fast?
• Free Your Technical Aesthetic from the 1970s
• Stop the Vertical Tab Madness
• Advice to Aimless, Excited Programmers
• Write Code Like You Just Learned How to Program

functional programming

• Admitting that Functional Programming Can Be Awkward
• Functional Programming Archaeology
• Back to the Basics of Functional Programming
• Purely Functional Retrogames
• Functional Programming Went Mainstream Years Ago
• Accidentally Introducing Side Effects into Purely Functional Code
• Let's Take a Trivial Problem and Make it Hard
• Functional Programming Doesn't Work (and what to do about it)
• Explaining Functional Programming to Eight-Year-Olds

Erlang

• A Deeper Look at Tail Recursion in Erlang
• On the Perils of Benchmarking Erlang
• Garbage Collection in Erlang
• How to Crash Erlang
• How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Erlang's Process Dictionary
• What to do About Erlang's Records?
• A Ramble Through Erlang IO Lists
• Erlang vs. Unintentionally Purely Functional Python
• A Concurrent Language for Non-Concurrent Software

personal

• My Road to Erlang
• A Personal History of Compilation Speed
• The Pure Tech Side is the Dark Side
• Tales of a Former Disassembly Addict
• The Recovering Programmer
• No Comment
• Eleven Years of Erlang
• A Short Story About Verbosity
• Easy to Please

progress

• A Spellchecker Used to Be a Major Feat of Software Engineering
• How My Brain Kept Me from Co-Founding YouTube
• How Did Things Ever Get This Good?
• Slow Languages Battle Across Time
• Nothing Like a Little Bit of Magic
• How Much Processing Power Does it Take to be Fast?
• Instant-On

J

• Functional Programming Archaeology
• Five Memorable Books About Programming
• The World's Most Mind-Bending Language Has the Best Development Environment

Forth

• Deriving Forth
• Five Memorable Books About Programming
• Understanding What It's Like to Program in Forth

other entries that I think were successful

• Slumming with BASIC Programmers
• Coding as Performance
• Macho Programming
• Timidity Does Not Convince
• On Being Sufficiently Smart
• Flickr as a Business Simulator
• Rethinking Programming Language Tutorials
• Tricky When You Least Expect It
• What Do People Like?
• Personal Programming
• Living Inside Your Own Black Box
• How to Think Like a Pioneer

permalink December 29, 2010

previously

• Write Code Like You Just Learned How to Program
• Instant-On
• Learning to Ignore Superficially Ugly Code
• Good-Bye to the Sprawling Suburbs of Screen Space
• Easy to Please

archives

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