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...

Have you ever felt the need to perform set theoretic operations on types? Not really? Me neither, but I thought it’s a fun thing to try out. So, if you ever feel the need of using type sets, C++11 makes it quite easy to do so. Especially variadic templates allow for a much more condensed syntax compared to type list constructs formerly used. (Disclaimer: This is rather a proof of concept, but maybe somebody comes up with a useful scenario.)Let’s start by defining an empty type_set type:template<typename ... Types>struct type_set; typedef type_set<>...

Visual Basic is a better programming language than Visual C#. Who says so? This article! Here are 10 reasons why you should always choose VB over C#. 1 – “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” This is a quotation from Gertrude Stein’s 1922 play Geography and Plays. However, the poetry wouldn’t work in C#, because – unforgivably – it’s a cASe-SeNSitIvE language. This is madness! Before I start ranting, let me just acknowledge that case-sensitivity confers one (and only one) advantage – it makes it easier to name private and public prope...

Writing documentation is one of those things that is dreaded by many developers. It takes a lot of effort and time to get right. And too often, people take shortcuts. This is sad, because well designed documentation is the key to getting people excited about your project, whether it's open source or a developer focused product.In fact, I argue that the most important piece of UX for a developer product isn't the homepage or the sign up process or the SDK download. It's the API documentation! Who cares if your product is the most powerful thing in the world if no one understands how to use it.I...

You've finished this book and have decided to continue with programming.Maybe it will be a career for you, or maybe it will be a hobby. You'll needsome advice to make sure you continue on the right path, and get the mostenjoyment out of your newly chosen activity.I've been programming for a very long time. So long that it's incrediblyboring to me. At the time that I wrote this book, I knew about 20 programminglanguages and could learn new ones in about a day to a week depending on howweird they were. Eventually though this just became boring and couldn't holdmy interest anymore. This does...

Thetechnique for Dividing any number by 9 mentally is simply to reduce a complex divisionto a very simple addition. The technique can be applied from both ends i.e. from right-most digit or from left-most digit. Dividingby 9 into a mixed number from right-most digit uses the Divisibility Rules for9:1.     First, add all the digitstogether and divide by 9, keeping in mind the whole number and the remainder.2.     Write the remainder over 9, thisis the fraction part of the answer. (Make sure the fraction is in simplestform.)3.     Add a...

As an active member of "The Internet" and vocal Objective-C coder, I get a lot of questions surrounding the language. They're often framed around thinking about learning the language or trying to write an app, but they also usually involve a phrase like "Objective-C looks really hard" or "what are all those minus signs about?" Both of these are pretty good questions, and I'd like to address why someone might be more hesitant to jump into iOS or OS X development compared to, say, Ruby or Java.SyntaxLet's talk about what a programming language is. A programming language is the human-readable cod...

Pixenomics stores and transports 1.2 million pixels from the server to the client. During development we played with various methods to store and process this. Our ultimate goal was to send the entire board in under 1 second.During the stages of prototyping we used a MySQL database without thinking too much about performance. With a mere 2,000 pixels we quickly realised this wasn’t even usable as a demo. Changing the storage engine to memory was much better but still obviously unusable.The problem wasn’t to store the pixels but to retrieve all 1.2 million pixels quickly as well a...