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  Can Your Programming Language Do This?

One day, you're browsing through your code, and you notice two big blocks that look almost exactly the same. In fact, they're exactly the same, except that one block refers to "Spaghetti" and one block refers to "Chocolate Moose." // A trivial example: alert("I'd like some Spaghetti!"); alert("I'd like some Chocolate Moose!"); These examples happen to be in JavaScript, but even if you don't know JavaScript, you should be able to follow along. The repeated code looks wrong, ...

   Programming,Maintainability,Reusable     2011-05-31 07:42:41

  A couple of tips for beginning programmers

Whether it is football, quantum physics, a new foreign language or programming, the beginnings are problematic. What is more, no amount of advice can teach you as much as your own experience. Nevertheless, the following tips will help you avoid some mistakes, save your time and develop good programmer habits from the very beginning.Practise logical thinkingAlthough some may laugh at the stereotype of a programmer being a Maths genius, there is no use denying that learning Maths and Logics prepar...

   Programming,Tips,Beginner     2014-06-17 07:47:31

  The Wasteful Legacy of Programming as Language

A few years ago I visited a friend who is a graduate student in linguistics. After some time he asked me if I was aware of the work by Chomsky on formal languages. I told him that yes, Chomsky work was a basis for much of the developments in theoretical computer science. More than that, I was glad to learn that there was something technical that I could share and discuss with other people in linguistics. At the time I found this was just a great coincidence. It was only recently, though, t...

   Programming language,Human language,Chomsky     2011-11-28 10:36:34

  A Programming Idiom You've Never Heard Of

Here are some sequences of events: Take the rake out of the shed, use it to pile up the leaves in the backyard, then put the rake back in the shed. Fly to Seattle, see the sights, then fly home. Put the key in the door, open it, then take the key out of the door. Wake-up your phone, check the time, then put it back to sleep. See the pattern? You do something, then do something else, then you undo the first thing. Or more accurately, the last step is the inverse of the first. Once you're aware ...

   Programming,Idiom,Strange     2012-01-04 08:12:25

  The History of Programming Languages

This post is part of our ReadWriteHack channel, which is a resource and guide for developers. The channel is sponsored by the Intel AppUp Developer Program. As you're exploring these resources, check out this helpful resource from our sponsors: AIR for AppUp: What You Need To Know Rackspace recently published a nice infographic on the evolution of programming languages. It starts with FORTRAN and COBOL and runs through Ruby on Rails (which, yes, is a framework and not a language). Unfo...

   History,Programming language,C,Java,Java     2011-07-28 09:00:23

  We need a programming language for the rest of us

Recently I took on the enormous task of learning Objective-C from the bottom up and I was struck by something I couldn’t shake: this is too hard. An experienced developer might scoff at me for saying that, but it’s true. I’ll be honest about my education, Calculus II was the most math I ever took, I have an advanced degree from Berkeley in Journalism. I am a proficient HTML/CSS developer and can glue enough javascript together to solve almost any problem that has presen...

   Code.Programming,Expectation,Easy-to-use     2011-07-22 02:20:09

  Importance of Side Projects

Side projects are important for a few reasons. Programming is a creative process. Side projects allow programming without deadlines or restraints. Side projects allow programming in an exploratory way. Explore new technologies Every day there are more and more bleeding edge technologies coming out. A side project is a great place to try them out. There’s no reason to worry about bugs or performance issues because it’s just a side project. You’re not depending on the ...

   Side project,Creative idea,Dealine,Scratch,Launch     2011-11-28 03:17:22

  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

  I've run out of adjectives

The news of Dennis Ritchie's passing hit hard. So much has been written in the past day. His impact was enormous, and outside the tech world, mostly unknown - but very much felt. C underpins everything. My whole career has grown out of C and Unix. Wow.For most engineers working today, it's hard to understand the euphoria I felt in the 70s when a programming language finally came along that I (and everyone else) could use to move up from writing in assembler to a real programming l...

   Dennis Ritchie,James Gosling,Death,Praise,Comment,C     2011-10-20 02:55:58

  Programming Language Readability

Lets compare some Python to Haskell for solving the same problem.  The problem we’ll pick is Trie data-structure for auto-completions.  We are interested not so much in the nitty gritty of the algorithm, but in the language style itself.  Auto-complete has been in the programming news a lot recently; both a Python and a Haskell solver have turned up. (I suspect this post got flagged on Hacker News :(  It never got on the front-page despite the rapid upvoting on a n...

   Programming,Readability,Python,Haskell     2012-02-27 04:52:02

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