I love programming. I can truly say that of all the things I enjoy, I enjoy programming the most. There's nothing quite like the feeling you get when you create something. Writing code is a lot like building your own little universe.When you build stuff, you're in complete control, and, no matter how hard you fight it, your code directly reflects yourself. If you write sloppy code, I can almost guarantee you'll be a sloppy person. If you haphazardly throw code around with any care or passion, it's likely you treat yourself the same way.I tend to think of myself as a passionate programmer ...

Cory Doctorow's latest talk 'The Coming War on General Purpose Computing' really puts things in perspective about life in the 21st century. This got me thinking more about functional programming languages and how they are related to the intentional limitation/crippling of turing machines by industry and government.What if Stallman is right about the intentional efforts to limit freedom of information ? What if it's even worse than we all think it is ?In relation to functional languages : might industry and academia intentionally not want them to become popular ? At least not yet ?Might powerfu...

Every process is initialized with three open file descriptors, stdin, stdout, and stderr. stdin is an abstraction for accepting input (from the keyboard or from pipes) and stdout is an abstraction for giving output (to a file, to a pipe, to a console).That's a very simplified explanation but true nonetheless. Those three file descriptors are collectively called 'The Standard Streams'.Where does stderr come from?It's fairly straightforward to understand why stdin and stdout exist, however stderr seems like the odd one out. Why do we need another stream for errors?This is a quote from Doug McIll...

In my code journeys and programming adventures I’ve encountered many strange foes, and even stranger allies. I’ve identified at least five different kinds of code warriors, some make for wonderful comrades in arms, while others seem to foil my every plan.However they all have their place in the pantheon of software development. Without a healthy mix of these different programming styles you’ll probably find your projects either take too long to complete, are not stable enough or are too perfect for humans to look upon. The duct tape programmerThe code may not be pretty...

IntroductionWhy 37signals Doesn't Hire Programmers Based on Brainteasers and my comment on HN generated a lot of responses, so much so that I'm writing this post to properly explain the essence of a good (IMHO) interview programming problem.Pascal's TrianglePascal's Triangle is a shortcut for getting coefficients most often used binomial probability. The root element is 1. Every other element is the sum of the one or two above it (diagonally left and diagonally right).There are several variations of the problem:Print out the triangle to a specific row;Return a given row of the triangle;Return ...

Like farming was in the 17th century, factory work during the industrial revolution, construction during the Great Depression, and manufacturing after World War II. Better, because writing code is a creative act which can be done with or without a traditional (antiquated?) office-based job, and can create enormous personal and economic value.Most young people start in jobs that don’t have much of a future. Most don’t get higher education – only a third get any advanced degree. In the past, students who missed out on a higher education learned vocational skil...

Here are some sequences of events:Take the rake out of the shed, use it to pile up the leaves in the backyard, then put the rake back in the shed.Fly to Seattle, see the sights, then fly home.Put the key in the door, open it, then take the key out of the door.Wake-up your phone, check the time, then put it back to sleep.See the pattern? You do something, then do something else, then you undo the first thing. Or more accurately, the last step is the inverse of the first. Once you're aware of this pattern, you'll see it everywhere. Pick up the cup, take a sip of coffee, put the cup down. And it'...

Did you know that we have a nice collection of puzzles here on less than dot? Some are harder than others so there is something for everyone. You can pic any language you want, you will see that there are solutions in Ruby, Python, Visual Basic, SQL, JavaScript, C++ and other.Here is a partial list of what we have Friday the ThirteenthsThe goal is to identify all friday the thirteenths for a given timeframeRegular PentagonGiven a grid co-ordinate (x,y) as the centre point of a regular pentagon, and the sum of the length of the sides, return the co-ordinates of each point as: "Top", "MidLeft",...