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  Illiterate Programming

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 super...

   Programming,Illiterate     2012-02-10 06:20:52

  IBM Launches Maqetta HTML5 Tool as Open-Source

IBM announced Maqetta, an HTML5 authoring tool for building desktop and mobile user interfaces, and also announced the contribution of the open-source technology to the Dojo Foundation. LAS VEGAS – At the IBM Impact 2011 conference here, IBM announced both Maqetta as well as the open-source contribution of its Maqetta HTML5 visual authoring tool to the Dojo Foundation. Maqetta is an open-source project that provides WYSIWYG visual authoring of HTML5 user interfaces using drag-and-drop ass...

   IBM,Open Source,Dojo foundation,HTML 5,W     2011-04-12 01:59:29

  What Happened to Software Engineering?

Over the past few years there has been an evolutionary shift in the world of software development.  Not very long ago, the dominant Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) methodology was the Waterfall Method with very specific phases that separated the construction phase from phases like design and test. The software development industry, still very new, was striving to find a repeatable, predictable process for developing software.  The best model for this seemed to be the physical sc...

   Software engineering,Software,Developmen     2011-09-07 10:42:34

  Apps and web apps and the future

Dave Winer: Why apps are not the future: The great thing about the web is linking. I don’t care how ugly it looks and how pretty your app is, if I can’t link in and out of your world, it’s not even close to a replacement for the web. Let’s set aside one thing right away. The browser is an app. Text editors, outliners, and web servers are apps. And, without them, there’s no web at all. Somebody has to write these things. That implies APIs and more tools ...

   App,Web app,Future,Difference     2011-12-14 07:10:43

  Fujitsu CTO: Flash is just a stopgap

Flash is a necessary waystation as we travel to a single in-memory storage architecture. That's the view from a Fujitsu chief technology officer's office. Dr Joseph Reger, CTO at Fujitsu Technology Solutions, is that office-holder, and – according to him – flash is beset with problems that will become unsolvable. He says we are seeing increases in flash density at the expense of our ability to read and write data. Each shrink in process geometry, from 3X to 2X and onto 1X, ...

   Flash,Memory,Bottleneck,Limitation,Futur     2011-08-12 07:31:34

  On Programming Deadlines

There are a lot of differences between programming, and programming professionally. The most notorious of which, is deadlines.DeadlinesWhen you're writing code for yourself, you can spend as much (or as little time) on it as you please--but when you're writing code for other people, you've got only a limited amount of time and resources to get the job done. In my experience, this typically leads to one of two situations:You've got to extend the deadline to finish the job properly.You've got to w...

   Programming,Deadline,Transparent,Test,TODO     2011-11-01 07:10:21

  Code reviews in the 21st Century

There's an old adage that goes something like: 'Do not talk about religion or politics'.  Why?  Because these subjects are full of strong opinions but are thin on objective answers.   One person's certainty is another person's skepticism; someone else's common sense just appears as an a prior bias to those who see matters differently.  Sadly,  conversing these controversial subjects can generate more heat than light.   All too often people can get s...

   Code review,21 Centuary     2012-02-10 06:39:14

  Why I switched from Ruby back to C++

After two months of Sol Trader development in Ruby, I took a difficult decision last Wednesday morning: I’ve decided to rewrite the game code from scratch in C++. Let me explain my reasons. If you'd like to receive announcements about Sol Trader or be part of the beta program, sign up at soltrader.net. Why I did it Slow frames: When working with Ruby, I use the excellent Gosu library to do all my game specific coding. This initially worked great, but occasionally I’d just...

   C++,Ruby,Advantage,Feature     2012-01-09 08:56:21

  Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For September 16, 2011

Between love and madness lies HighScalability:Google now 10x better: MapReduce sorts 1 petabyte of data using 8000 computers in 33 minutes; 1 Billion on Social Networks;Tumblr at 10 Billion Posts; Twitter at 100 Million Users; Testing at Google Scale: 1800 builds, 120 million test suites, 60 million tests run daily.From the Dash Memo on Google's Plan: Go is a very promising systems-programming language in the vein of C++. We fully hope and expect that Go become...

   Scalability,Go,Google,MapReduce,Muppet,M     2011-09-20 11:22:36

  PHP Sucks! But I Like It!

I read a rather interesting post yesterday called PHP: a fractal of bad design. It's been getting a lot of traffic among the PHP community lately because it's rather inflammatory. But to be honest, it does make a lot of really good points. It also makes a lot of mistakes and misses a bigger picture. A Few Mistakes The post makes quite a few mistakes and odd apples to oranges comparisons. Let me point out the major ones that I saw. No Debugger - PHP has xdebug which works quite...

   PHP,Bad design,Like     2012-04-12 06:15:42

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