Donald Knuth cleverly imprisoned the phrase "Literate Programming" - if you're not documenting your source with his particular methodology then you must be a proponent of "Illiterate Programming," which sounds truly awful.I very much believe in documented code but I think no amount of pontification in English will ever make a piece of code clearer than the code itself (I'm not talking about project or API documentation). I'm also not talking about the superficial notions / arguments of "readability" that are bandied about these days (Python, CoffeeScript, etc).Mos...

An actress acquaintance of mine—let's call her Esmerelda—once said, "I can't imagine being anything except an actress." To which the retort was given, "You can't be much of an actress then, can you?"I was reminded of this exchange when someone said to me about Go, "I can't imagine programming in a language that doesn't have generics." My retort, unspoken this time, was, "You can't be much of a programmer, then, can you?"This is not an essay about generics (which are a fine thing and may arrive in Go one day, or may not) but about imagination, or at least what passes for imagina...

Erlang is a complex system, and I can’t do its inner workings justice in a short article, but I wanted to give some insight into what goes on when a module is compiled and loaded. As with most compilers, the first step is to convert the textual source to an abstract syntax tree, but that’s unremarkable. What is interesting is that the code goes through three major representations, and you can look at each of them.Erlang is unique among functional languages in its casual scope rules. You introduce variables as you go, without fanfare, and there’s no creeping indentation cau...

During last semester I was attending Multiprocessor Architectures course, given at Facultad de Informática where I study my Computer Science degree.As part of the assignments due to pass the course, we had to do several programs written in C to benchmark matrix multiplication by testing different techniques and technologies. First of all we had to do a secuential program in three different versions:A normal one where the result matrix is ordered by rows and the loops range the matrix by rows tooAn “inter” version where the result matrix is ordered by rows but the loops range the...

Everybody's talking about how programming is the skill that we all are going to need. [Except those folks who might feel that most programming could be turned into wizard-like tools. Insert long discussion about Strong AI.]But what's a programmer? Is the guy who set up his own Apache Web Server a programmer? How about the guy who created a complex Excel spreadsheet? The guy who made his own RPG level? Minecraft players? When we say "Everybody is going to have to know programming" what, exactly, does that mean?We need a set of programming levels.Level 1, The Read-and-Type: This is the guy who ...

So we all have been here, I had finished a project using VS2008, implementing  Datagridviews on litterally each and every form of the system. This had been a requirement from the onset as to ensure easy searching,navigation and capturing of data. So the data capture ladies start doing their thing and low and behold the dreaded call... they are unhappy with the speed of the DataGridView. I had to agree with them, the repaint of the and overall perfromance of the grid is awfull. So started a tedious process of trying to speed this up...The first step was to look at ...

Performing manual, repetitive tasks enrages me. I used to think this was a corollary of being a programmer, but I’ve come to suspect (or hope) that this behaviour is inherent in being human.But being able to hack together scripts simply makes it much easier to go from a state of rage to a basic solution in a very small amount of time. As a side point, this is one of the reasons that teaching the basics of programming in schools is so important. It’s hard to think of any job which wouldn’t benefit from a few simple scripts to perform more automation.When we’re h...

Today we caught up with Andrei Alexandrescu for a “10 Question” interview. He is a Romanian born research engineer at Facebook living in the US, you can contact him on his website erdani.com or @incomputable.We will talk about some of the juicy stuff that going on at Facebook, so let’s get started.Hello Andrei, welcome on Server-Side Magazine.1. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Who are you? Where and what do you work?Who am I? Ah, the coffee breath of one talking about himself. Well let me try. I’m a hacker living in the US, originally from Romania. In 2001 I wrot...