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  Common Lisp is the best language to learn programming

Now that Conrad Barski's Land of Lisp (see my review on Slashdot) has come out, I definitely think Common Lisp is the best language for kids (or anyone else) to start learning computer programming.Between Land of Lisp, David Touretzky's Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation (really great book for people new to programming, available for free) and The Little LISPer (3rd edition, editions four and up use Scheme) you have three really great resources to get started.Lisp's synta...

   Common Lisp,Kid,Programming language,First     2011-10-31 00:07:12

  Crazy: 90 Percent of People Don't Know How to Use CTRL+F

This week, I talked with Dan Russell, a search anthropologist at Google, about the time he spends with random people studying how they search for stuff. One statistic blew my mind. 90 percent of people in their studies don't know how to use CTRL/Command + F to find a word in a document or web page! I probably use that trick 20 times per day and yet the vast majority of people don't use it at all."90 percent of the US Internet population does not know that. This is on a sample size of thousa...

   Ctrl-F,Shortcut,Common knowledge,Confusi     2011-09-02 11:16:48

  What's in common between building a startup and having a baby?

Many young people put their dreams into their own startups. Building a startup not only needs your idea, it also takes time and effort. You also need to take the risk of failing. Actually, a startup is just like your own baby, you spend day and night with it, you are excited with its growth. What's in common between building a startup and having a baby? One popular summary is : 1. The conception is the most fun part.2. Then getting the darn thing to take birth is painful3. In the early months an...

   Startup,Baby,Tips     2013-07-21 21:40:17

  Key challenges in Agile implementations

7Share6inShareAgile methodology was supposed to be a solution to solve all of our problems. But it looks like it’s not. Some issues appear when companies start to implement Agile in their organizations. A research has been done on seventeen companies using Agile methodology (People over processes: Key people challenges in Agile Development). Authors chose nine of the most often reported issues. I’d like to focus on four, in my opinion, most important. #1 Developer...

   Agile development,Chanllenge,Communication,Business     2011-11-30 02:55:04

  Data Scientists and Their Harder Skills than Big Data

The field of data science is often confused with that of big data. Data science is an aid to decision makers in a company with a logical approach.  Who is a Data Scientist?  A Data Scientist reviews a huge collection of data(that may extend to a couple of terabytes of disk space or thousands of excel sheets). This humongous chunk of data is not feasible for being handled, sorted and analyzed by a single person. Here we require the help of data science, and most recently, the field of A...

   BIG DATA     2017-12-13 04:22:55

  Convert time to Unix time

Unix time is defined as the number of seconds that have elapsed since midnight Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), 1 January 1970,not counting leap seconds. It is used widely in Unix-like and many other operating systems and file formats. It is neither a linear representation of time nor a true representation of UTC. Unix time may be checked on some Unix systems by typing date +%s on the command line. Sometimes it's a bit difficult to compare times stored in different applications or systems with ...

   UNIX time, Oracle DATE, conversion, timestamp     2013-01-19 09:04:17

  Do You Morph Into A Different Programmer?

Every experience you have as a software developer should change you in some way. And I don’t just mean growing older by virtue of time passing. Everything you do should evolve your understanding of your craft (and/or related skills) or your understanding of yourself – which ultimately achieves the same goal. I am not just talking about major milestones in your software development career like switching jobs, becoming a leader/manager or starting you own company. Every job, ev...

   Programmer,Steps,Process,Developer     2011-08-18 08:59:01

  "Simplicity" is not a simple concept

I've come to avoid using the word "Simplicity" or its variants ("Simple," &c.) It means too many different things to different people.For example, my original land-line phone was simple:It's simple by eliminating extraneous use cases. It only handles one user scenario, the one that was the most common when it was invented. If we think of the number of affordances and the number of uses, this kind of simplicity lowers the number of affordances by lowering the number of uses. I call this kind ...

   Simplicity,Software,Usability,iPhone,Phone     2011-11-24 09:21:09

  How to maintain a software project?

For a software engineer, at least from my own experience, maintaining an existing software project would take up a considerable amount of time: adding new features, fixing tricky bugs, and so on. In this post, I will share some some tips about how to become a veteran from a novice quickly when facing a new project. (1) Get familiar with the background knowledge of the project. Every software has its own purposes and users: a device driver serves the specified hardware, whilst a SMS gateway helps...

       2017-08-05 02:20:46

  The significance of coding competition to actual work

Some friends asked this question: In secondary schools we participate in the NOI, in university we participate in ACM/ICPC, TopCoder.What's the significance of coding competition to actual work? I participated in the NOI from 1994 to 1996, ACM/ICPC from 1999 to 2000 and TopCoder in 2002 for six months. Later I paid little attention to coding competition, so I may not understand the changes in recent years and race mode . The capabilities we can get by participating the competition can be summari...

   ACM,Programming,Facebook,TopCoder     2013-02-28 20:38:23