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

SEARCH KEYWORD -- programming

  Why Lua

In this article, I would like to discuss why you should use Lua. This all started with a message that recently popped up on the Lua mailing list regarding why isn't Lua more widely used? The answers went from randomness to lack of libraries to a variety of other things, but the one that resonated with me most was that there are fewer people who enjoy the do it yourself approach, which Lua fully embraces. I've come to think of Lua as the Arch Linux of programming languages. Which, almost by d...

   Lua,Feature,C,Simple,Portable     2012-02-27 04:58:15

  What’s Your Start-up’s “Bus Count”? 7 Myths of Entrepreneurship and Programming

Software development is a rapidly evolving field that got off to a very rocky start. Conventional wisdom for many years was that software engineering should be like other types of engineering: design carefully, specify precisely, and then just build it – exactly to spec. Just like building a bridge, right? The problem with this approach is that software is just that. Soft. It’s endlessly malleable. You can change software pretty much any time you want, and people do. A...

   Start-up,technical,company,tips     2011-07-04 07:44:54

  How to be an excellent programmer

To use a programming language is very easy for a programmer, but it's a dream for many programmers to be an expert software developer. There are five levels of programmers: Novice, Senior novice, competent, proficient, and expert. Most programmers are senior novice. And programmer living in this level are a lot of people who have 1 to 10 years work experience.As a programmer, how to find the bottlenecks for your improvement and how to improve yourself quickly? This is really not an easy question...

   Programming,Tips,Habit     2013-03-26 09:53:38

  10 Things Beginner Developers Should Know

If you are a novice developer, it might be confusing about where you should start, because the field is broad and provides many options for you. There are so many questions you might ask yourself, such as “What programming language should I learn?” or “Should I also know front-end, or only back-end?” And I am sure there are much more than that. Well, in order for you to be able to start with an advantage against the others, I’ve decided to help you start your ...

   Advice,Software developer,Beginner     2011-12-29 01:41:04

  Why Objective-C is Hard

As an active member of "The Internet" and vocal Objective-C coder, I get a lot of questions surrounding the language. They're often framed around thinking about learning the language or trying to write an app, but they also usually involve a phrase like "Objective-C looks really hard" or "what are all those minus signs about?" Both of these are pretty good questions, and I'd like to address why someone might be more hesitant to jump into iOS or OS X development compared to, say, Ruby or J...

   Objective-C,difficult,hard,reason,analysis     2012-03-07 05:11:28

  Introducing the for-if anti-pattern

Over the years, I've seen a bunch of coding anti-patterns. I figured maybe I'll share a few. Today, I'll introduce what I'm calling the for-if anti-pattern, also known as "We'll sell you the whole seat, but you'll only need the edge." This is a special case of the for-case anti-pattern, where all but one of the cases is null. for (int i = 0; i < 100; i++) { if (i == 42) { do_something(i); } } This can naturally be simplified to do_something(42); The for-if anti-pattern arises in ma...

   Programming,Anti-pattern,for-if,efficiency     2012-02-02 10:18:15

  Functional Programming in C++

Probably everyone reading this has heard “functional programming” put forth as something that is supposed to bring benefits to software development, or even heard it touted as a silver bullet.  However, a trip to Wikipedia for some more information can be initially off-putting, with early references to lambda calculus and formal systems.  It isn’t immediately clear what that has to do with writing better software. My pragmatic summary:  A large fraction of th...

   C++,Functional programming     2012-04-28 06:16:37

  Paradigms of Iteration in JavaScript

One of the joys of programming is that no matter how simple a problem may seem there are always tons of ways to solve it. It can be good practice to go back and revisit fundamentals by solving simple problems with as many implementations as you can think of. In this post we'll explore approaches to basic iteration in JavaScript. This style of exercise is a good interviewing technique, too, because it's open ended and leads to good discussions. The focus isn't a tricky, wacky problem you're...

   JavaScript,Iteration,Wrap,Recursive,For,Loop     2012-01-08 10:11:15

  "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

  It Should Only Take You a Few Hours...

It sure seems easy to make a table. Anyone can do it, right? Get 1 large flat rectangular piece of wood, 4 equally tall wooden poles, 4 nails and a hammer. Nail the 4 poles to each corner of the flat rectangular bit, and you have a table. Ta daaa! Now ask a carpenter to craft you a table. First they will spend time discussing the purpose and function of the table - indoor or outdoor, kitchen or dining room, for show or heavy use, what load does it need to bear. Then they will determine th...

   Programming,software,Craft     2012-03-01 05:09:10

RECENT