Today's Question:  What does your personal desk look like?        GIVE A SHOUT

SEARCH KEYWORD -- System programming



  Productivity is just work

The other day, I wrote a post declaring that I will no longer try to increase my productivity. This doesn't mean I won't read productivity blogs, and tweak things, and manage my "system". It means I no longer think about any of that stuff as having anything to do with productivity. Productivity is what happens when you're doing work. Enhancing your productivity is what happens when you do a lot of work, for long enough to get better at it. Look, throw all your stuff in Dropbox, live yo...

   Productivity,Work,Enhancement     2012-01-05 08:18:36

  How I Learned to Program

Programming is, without a doubt, the most mentally rewarding thing I've ever done. Programming taught me that life should be fun, filled with creativity, and lived to the fullest. Programming taught me that anything is possible; I can do anything I want using only my mind. Programming also taught me that learning is fun. It showed me that the more you know, the more power you have. Programming showed me that a life filled with learning is a life worth living. Programming revealed to me wh...

   Programming,Tips,Write,Practice,Interest     2012-02-04 21:37:12

  Which Type of IT Career is Best For You?

Considering the growth of the information technology job market, a career in IT is an incredibly smart career move.  A career in IT can mean many things – you can become a network administration, website developer, database specialist, programmer or engineer. The job range is vast and can suit various personalities and levels of technical skill. Having a good insight into those job profiles is key to make the right decision about your career path. Here's a selection of some of the mos...

   career,IT,tips     2014-07-30 09:21:40

  3 meanings of Stack

We may frequently see stack when we read programming books. But many times we may be confused about the different meanings of it. This term actually has three common meanings. Here we explain the three different meanings of Stack in programming. 1. Data structure The first meaning of Stack defines a method for storing data. Its feature is LIFO9Last In First Out). In this data structure, data are accumulated level by level. The data last put in is added at the top of the stack. When using the dat...

   Stack,Memory,Data structure     2014-02-24 04:56:46

  Practice of using spinlock instead of mutex

Spinlock and mutex are two important concepts in multithreading programs. They are used to lock some shared resource to prevent concurrent access which may affect data consistency. But they do have differences, what are the differences? when should we use spinlock instead of mutex? The Theory In theory, when a thread tries to lock a mutex and it does not succeed, because the mutex is already locked, it will go to sleep, immediately allowing another thread to run. It will continue to sleep until...

   Spinlock,Mutex,Concurrency     2014-04-19 21:54:12

  Leaving comments in real life

As a programmer I like to write comments because I know that some future person (often me) is going to need to know something about my code that won't be immediately obvious from reading it. Here's a recent example from my homebrew display's code:// protocol_init: Set up a newly powered-on string of lights.  The lights are arranged// in an array wired diagonally starting from the bottom left.  For ease of programming// it's better if they are given numbers which correspond to coor...

   Comment,Programming,Style,Format,Coding standard     2011-11-15 11:42:19

  If PHP Were British

When Rasmus Lerdorf first put PHP together, he - quite sensibly, despite his heritage - chose not to write it in Greenlandic or Danish. Good job too - that would have been rather unpleasant to work with. He opted instead, being in Canada at the time, for the local tongue. No, not French - that bastard dialect of the Queen's English commonly referred to as "US English"1. PHP developers in Britain have been grumpy about this ever since. What was he thinking? And more importantly, how do we ...

   PHP,British,Class,Statement,Engilish like     2011-12-01 02:36:55

  Scala Macros

This is the home page of project Kepler, an ongoing effort towards bringing compile-time metaprogramming to Scala. Our flavor of macros is reminiscent of Lisp macros, adapted to incorporate type safety and rich syntax. Unlike infamous C/C++ preprocessor macros, Scala macros: 1) are written in full-fledged Scala, 2) work with expression trees, not with raw strings, 3) cannot change syntax of Scala. You can learn more about our vision of metaprogramming from our talks. We propose to enrich Scala ...

   Scala,Macro,Efficiency,Maintainebility     2012-02-01 00:12:15

  Different module types in Java 9

Java 9 is going to introduce a disruptive change to the Java platform -- Module System. The module system will change how Java applications work in the future. It's like changing the foundation of a house without impacting the house functionality and its top level structure. This obviously is a big challenge for the whole Java community.  To bring as little pain as possible to migrate existing applications to Java 9 without refactoring the whole application, Java 9 will introduce a few diff...

   JAVA,JAVA 9,JIGSAW,MODULE SYSTEM,UNNAMED MODULE,AUTOMATIC MODULE,NAMED MODULE     2016-04-15 07:15:23

  Why learning Haskell/Python makes you a worse programmer

I've found, contrary to what you sometimes read, that learning Python and Haskell has not improved my programming using other languages. Haskell in particular, being so different from imperative languages, is supposed to give new insights into programming that will help you even when you are not using the language. My current experience doesn't exactly tally with this, and here is why:Demotivation.I find I think in Python, and even in Haskell to some extent, even though I have used Has...

   Python,Programmer,Bad,Bad programmer,Haskell     2011-10-29 07:13:44