I wrote a README the other day for a project that I’m hoping other developers will look at and learn from, and as I was writing it, I realized that it was the sort of thing that might have intimidated the hell out of me a couple of years ago, what with its casual mentions of Node, npm, Homebrew, git, tests, and development and production builds.Once upon a time, editing files, testing them locally (as best as we could, anyway), and then FTPing them to the server was the essential workflow of a front-end dev. We measured our mettle based on our ability to wrangle IE6 into submission or a...

Once or twice a month I get the question from an aspiring entrepreneur that’s been pushing their idea forward in hopes to (very soon) create a company out of what they’ve been working so hard on. They’ve spent countless hours working through all the details of what this new product will do, who they’re going to partner with and what they’re going to charge for it. They may even be on the Lean Startup bandwagon and actually talked with potential customers.A lot of work has been done and now all that is need is one thing - someone to code it up. They know ...

Beijing, March 28. According to foreign media reports, Google engineer Alex Russell this week at EclipseCon meeting said the company is now developing lots of advanced programming techniques to simplify Web application development.Russell said, "Web development has come to a critical point, it is becoming a run-time library integration platform." Although Web is very popular compared to some platforms such as Java or Windows, it provides only a relatively original programming capability. A major drawback of the Web there is no common component model which affects the code testing and reus...

In a statically typed language, the compiler knows the data-type of a variable and how to represent that.In a dynamically-typed language, it has to keep flag describing the actual type of the value of the variable, and the program has to perform a data-dependent branch on that value each time it manipulates a variable.  It also has to look up all methods and operators on it.The knock-on effect of this on branching and data locality is lethal to general purpose runtime performance.That’s why the dynamic language JIT benchmarks emphasise near-C speed on small inner loops but steer cl...

Attempts to verify the utility of languages stifle innovation. Christopher Mims 03/06/2012 30 Comments Compared to the versions that are hacked together late at night under insane deadline pressure, the programming languages to come out of academia are failures. Well, not all of them. History can speak for itself. Via UC Irvine computer scientist Cristina Videira Lopes, who deserves credit for any insight you might get from this post, which is a gloss on her excellent, if long, Research in Programming Languages:Languages people use and love:PHP - Hacked toget...

There is always a voice recent years saying that coding will gradually die, software development is more like an assembly job. i.e, programmer will be more and more like IT engineers. They seldom build something from scratch, instead they achieve the goal by assemble different components.There are people who have similar views around me. From the book "Clean code" written by Robert C Martin--"One might argue that a book about code is somehow behind the times—that code is nolonger the issue; that we should be concerned about models and requirements instead.Indeed some have suggested that...

"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." - Donald KnuthEarlier today, I came across a post during a google-fu session that claimed that no one should use the C++ standard library function make_heap, because almost nobody uses it correctly. I immediately started mentally ranting about how utterly ridiculous this claim is, because anyone whose gone to a basic algorithm class would know how to properly use make_heap. Then I started thinking about all the programmers who don't know what a heap is, and furthermore probably don't even need to know.Then I reali...

I’ve been thinking a lot about APIs and their design recently.I stumbled on this fantastic quote from Greg Parker: A programming language is a user interface for developers. Language authors should learn from HCI principles.22/02/2012 19:10 via webReplyRetweetFavorite@gparkerGreg ParkerWhen I first started learning C++ (back in the bad old days) I was convinced that any 1st year student could design a better programming language. One which behaved in a sane fashion without a lot of legacy cruft. In many ways, PHP is that programming language. It’s simple, logical, and works wi...