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  What Can We Learn From Dennis Ritchie?

As we noted earlier this week, one of the founding fathers of UNIX and the creator of C, Dennis Ritchie, passed away last weekend. While I feel that many in computer science and related fields knew of Ritchie’s importance to the growth and development of, well, everything to do with computing, I think it’s valuable to look back at his accomplishments and place him high in the CS pantheon already populated by Lovelace, Turing, and (although this crowing will be controversial, at lea...

   C,Father,Dennis Ritchie,Death,Father of C,UNIX     2011-10-17 10:12:02

  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

  The Essence of Google Dart: Building Applications, Snapshots, Isolates

WÑ–th thousands of programming languages floating around, why is Google introducing Google Dart? What can it possibly add? The short answer: the Google Dart team wanted a language well suited to modern application development, both on the server and the (mobile) client. Some of Dart's features address problems that languages like Java or Javascript have long had. Dart's Snapshots resemble Smalltalk images, allowing (nearly) instant application startup and wi...

   Dart,Google,Client side,Web,Language,Snapshort,Isolate     2011-10-24 11:41:16

  Top 10 Reasons to Use HTML5 Right Now

So you’re still not using HTML5, huh? I guess you probably have your reasons; it’s not fully adopted yet, it doesn’t work in IE, you don’t like users, you’re out of touch or you are just passionately in love with writing strict XHTML code. HTML5 is the revolution that the web needed and the fact is, it is the future whether you like it or not — suck it up and deal. HTML5 isn’t hard to use or understand and even though it’s not fully a...

   HTML5,Accessibility,Cross browser compatibility     2011-12-08 02:52:38

  Why, oh WHY, do those #?@! nutheads use vi?

Yes, even if you can't believe it, there are a lot fans of the 30-years-old vi editor (or its more recent, just-15-years-old, best clone & great improvement, vim). No, they are not dinosaurs who don't want to catch up with the times - the community of vi users just keeps growing: myself, I only got started 2 years ago (after over 10 years of being a professional programmer). Friends of mine are converting today. Heck, most vi users were not even born when...

   Linux,Vi,Vim,Advantage,History     2012-02-05 07:21:17

  The Death Of The Spec

Earlier today, my colleague Matt Burns wrote a post noting that most tablet makers may be largely failing because they’ve sold their soul to Android and are now just in the middle of a spec war, which no one can win. I’m gonna go one step further in that line of thinking: the spec is dead.There have been a few key stories from the past couple of weeks that highlight this new reality. Barnes & Noble unveiled the new Nook Tablet. Consumer Reports looked at the...

   Specification,Android,Platform,Software design     2011-11-15 08:20:22

  FTP Must Die

The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is specified in RFC 959, published in October 1985. The attempt in this specification is to satisfy the diverse needs of users of maxi-hosts, mini-hosts, personal workstations, and TACs, with a simple, and easily implemented protocol design.That's from the introduction. Does anyone here know what a TAC is? I don't. I had to look it up, since the acronym wasn't even expanded in the RFC. It took three tries in Google, and I finally found it in some obscur...

   FTP,Future,Death,Trend,Protocol     2012-02-06 08:13:36

  Coding tricks of game developers

If you've got any real world programming experience then no doubt at some point you've had to resort to some quick and dirty fix to get a problem solved or a feature implemented while a deadline loomed large. Game developers often experience a horrific "crunch" (also known as a "death march"), which happens in the last few months of a project leading up to the game's release date. Failing to meet the deadline can often mean the project gets cancelled or even worse, you lose your job. So w...

   Tricks,Advice,Gamedesign,Plan     2012-02-12 04:50:30

  True Scala complexity

Update 2: Sorry for the downtime. Leave it to the distributed systems guy to make his blog unavailable. Nginx saves the day.It’s always frustrating reading rants about Scala because they never articulate the actual complexities in the core language.Understandable—this post is intended fill that gap, and it wasn’t exactly easy to put together. But there’s been so much resistance to the very thought that the complexity exists at all, even from on up high, that I thou...

   Scala,Complexity     2012-01-10 07:17:07

  The four key figures behind the success of JavaScript - Douglas Crockford

JavaScript's success can be attributed to at least four key figures: Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript Douglas Crockford, the creator of JSLint and JSON John Resig, the creator of jQuery Ryan Dahl, the creator of Node.js. We are already very familiar with Brendan Eich and the invention process of JavaScript, so let's start with Douglas Crockford, the second in command of JavaScript. Alliance In the 1990s, Microsoft's dominance overshadowed the whole world. At this time, two challengers e...

   JAVASCRIPT,DOUGLAS CROCKFORD,HISTORY     2023-05-07 06:42:30

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