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  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

  Cracks in the Foundation

PHP has been around for a long time, and it’s starting to show its age. From top to bottom, the language has creaky joints. I’ve decided to take a look at how things got to this point, and what can be (and is being) done about it. I start out pretty gloomy, but bear with me; I promise it gets better. In the Beginning, There Was Apache and CGI And there was much rejoicing. In 1994, Rasmus Lerdorf created the “Personal Home Page Tools,” a set of CGI binaries wri...

   PHP,History,Foundation design,Compatibility     2011-12-18 01:03:54

  Python internals: adding a new statement to Python

This article is an attempt to better understand how the front-end of Python works. Just reading documentation and source code may be a bit boring, so I’m taking a hands-on approach here: I’m going to add an until statement to Python. All the coding for this article was done against the cutting-edge Py3k branch in the Python Mercurial repository mirror. The until statement Some languages, like Ruby, have an until statement, which is the complement to while (until num == 0 is equi...

   Python,New statement,Research,Addition     2012-03-12 07:32:24

  Notes on Programming in C

Introduction       Kernighan and Plauger's The Elements of Programming Style was an important and rightly influential book.  But sometimes I feel its concise rules were taken as a cookbook approach to good style instead of the succinct expression of a philosophy they were meant to be.  If the book claims that variable names should be chosen meaningfully, doesn't it then follow that variables whose names are small essays on their use are even better?  Isn't MaximumV...

   C,Notes,Tips     2011-12-09 07:55:47

  Ruby is beautiful (but I’m moving to Python)

The Ruby language is beautiful. And I think it deserves to break free from the Web. I think the future of Ruby is firmly stuck in Web development, though, so I’m going to invest in a new language for data analysis, at least for now. This is a look at the fantastic language I came to from Java and a look at a possible candidate. (Update: I’ve since written a followup.)Java to RubySix years ago, I added Ruby to my technical arsenal. I learned C++ and Java in high school, and I p...

   Ruby,Java,Python,Comparison,Advantage,Ruby vs Python     2011-11-01 07:18:11

  Functional Programming For Object Oriented Programmers

After recently remarking about how I finally "got" functional programming I was asked by one of my millions of twitter followers... ¬_¬ to write up an explanation of a small F# program spoken in terms that fellow O-O programmers would understand. Before I become too entrenched into the functional programming way of thinking, that is, and can't explain it anymore. As a former tutor this is one of the major problems with being able to teach something once you understand it. You've ...

   Functional programming,OOP,F#,Pattern     2011-11-25 13:49:16

  Microsoft wakes up to Open Source … in a big way!

Contrary to popular belief, Microsoft loves open-source. No, really! Don’t believe me? Read on: Today, Microsoft announced that it is open-sourcing all of its flagship web/cloud platform: ASP.NET MVC Web Pages (aka Razor), Web API. Importantly … these projects will be publicly hosted and that the team will continue development in the open (you’ll be able to view the repository and see the code commits as they happen) and that Microsoft will even cons...

   Oepn source,Microsoft,Ruby     2012-04-01 04:23:42

  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

  Signs that you're a bad programmer

1. Inability to reason about codeReasoning about code means being able to follow the execution path ("running the program in your head") while knowing what the goal of the code is.SymptomsThe presence of "voodoo code", or code that has no effect on the goal of the program but is diligently maintained anyway (such as initializing variables that are never used, calling functions that are irrelevant to the goal, producing output that is not used, etc.)Executing idempotent functions multiple times (...

   Sign,Programmer,Characteristics,Knowledge,Skill     2011-10-20 08:56:16

  Python for the Web

Python is the best language in the world for interacting with the web, and I'm going to show you why.This article will give an extremely high level overview of how to use python for the web. There are many ways you can interact with the web using python, and this post will cover all of them. This includes python web scraping, interacting with APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) and running your own python web site using python server software. There are many ways to do all these thing...

   Python,Web,Interaction,Communication,Network     2011-10-19 14:19:11

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