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  Vim: revisited

I’ve had an off/on relationship with Vim for the past many years. Before, I never felt like we understood each other properly. Vim is almost useless without plugins and some essential settings in .vimrc, but fiddling with all the knobs and installing all the plugins that I thought I needed was a process that in the end stretched out from few hours to weeks, months even; and it the end it just caused frustration instead of making me a happier coder. Recently, I decided to give Vim ano...

   Linux,Editor,Vim,Setup,Quick guideline     2011-12-12 07:55:27

  Functional Programming Is Hard, That's Why It's Good

Odds are, you don’t use a functional programming language every day. You probably aren’t getting paid to write code in Scala, Haskell, Erlang, F#, or a Lisp Dialect. The vast majority of people in the industry use OO languages like Python, Ruby, Java or C#–and they’re happy with them. Sure, they might occasionally use a “functional feature” like “blocks” now and then, but they aren’t writing functional code.And yet, for years we’v...

   Functional Programming,Hard,Difficult,Reason to learn,Good     2011-10-18 02:55:38

  C Macro Tips and Tricks

Preprocessor vs Compiler To properly understand C macros, you must understand how a C program is compiled. In particular, you must understand the different things that happen in the preprocessor and in the compiler. The preprocessor runs first, as the name implies. It performs some simple textual manipulations, such as: Stripping comments. Resolving #include directives and replacing them with the contents of the included file. Evaluating #if and #ifdef directives. Evaluating #defin...

   C,Macro,Preprocessor,Trick     2012-05-01 06:49:05

  Why Software Projects are Terrible and How Not To Fix Them

If you are a good developer and you’ve worked in bad organizations, you often have ideas to improve the process.  The famous Joel Test is a collection of 12 such ideas.  Some of these ideas have universal acceptance within the software industry (say, using source control), while others might be slightly more controversial (TDD).  But for any particular methodology, whether it is universally accepted or only “mostly” accepted, there are a multitude of o...

   Software,Development,Debug,Design     2011-11-21 10:27:05

  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

  Designing Fun

What is “Fun?”“I’ll know it when I see it.”In 1964, in Jacobellis v. Ohio, the US Supreme Court needed to decide whether the state of Ohio could ban a film it called “obscene”—a concept people understood but were hard-pressed to define. Justice Potter Stewart, in his concurring opinion, wrote: “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I ...

   Design,Fun,Create,Define,Research     2011-09-19 13:35:12

  Developing Game Audio with the Web Audio API

Caution: This article discusses APIs that are not yet fully standardized and still in flux. Be cautious when using experimental APIs in your own projects. Introduction Audio is a huge part of what makes multimedia experiences so compelling. If you've ever tried watching a movie with the sound off, you've probably noticed this. Games are no exception! My fondest video game memories are of the music and sound effects. Now, in many cases nearly two decades after playing my favorites, I still c...

   Web Audio,HTML5,Game audio     2012-04-15 01:25:23

  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

  Popular Golang JSON libraries evaluation

JSON (Javascript Object Notation), a prevailing data exchange format, is widely used in various platforms and languages. Golang, of course, will never miss the support for JSON. And with its own standard library, such as those interfaces like the REST API from the API Service in Kubernetes, it can easily process JSON. Although Go’s library works great, we can still seek those open-source JSON libs in Github to maximize our efficiency. Then the features, performance, applicability of these ...

   FASTJSON,JSON LIB,JSON LIB COMPARISON,GO-JSON     2021-12-11 23:13:23

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