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  JavaScript as a First Language

At Khan Academy we've been investigating teaching Computer Science to students in some new and interesting ways. The most interesting aspect of which is that we're likely going to be teaching them JavaScript as their first language. We're in a very unique position as we're primarily aiming to teach students who've been through our previous math and science-centric curriculum. Because of this we can create some rather compelling exercises and projects that never would've been feasible other...

   JavaScript,Learning,First language,Inheritence,Prototype     2011-12-23 07:53:45

  What to Look for in PHP 5.4.0

PHP 5.4.0 will arrive soon. The PHP team is working to bring to some very nice presents to PHP developers. In the previous release of 5.3.0 they had added a few language changes. This version is no different. Some of the other changes include the ability to use DTrace for watching PHP apps in BSD variants (there is a loadable kernel module for Linux folks). This release features many speed and security improvements along with some phasing out of older language features (Y2K ...

   PHP,5.4,New feature,Built-in server,Trait     2011-12-21 10:20:12

  Interesting Hello World

Hello world is the beginning of everything. When you first learn a new programming language, the first program you write is to print the "Hello world" string on the console with that language. For example: So who invented "Hello world"? It's Brian Kernighan, a canadian computer scientist and author of The C Programming Language and The Unix Programming Environment. In his books, he used to write "Hello world" which changed the whole world. Also programmers like to use foo and bar as variable n...

   Programming,History     2013-08-29 11:31:00

  Why We Moved Off The Cloud

Cloud computing is often positioned as a solution to scalability problems. In fact, it seems like almost every day I read a blog post about a company moving infrastructure to the cloud. At Mixpanel, we did the opposite. I’m writing this post to explain why and maybe even encourage some other startups to consider the alternative.First though, I wanted to write a short bit about the advantages of cloud servers since they are ideal for some use cases.Low initial costs. Specifically, you...

   Cloud,Cloud computing,Mixpanel,Get off,Disadvantage,Drawback     2011-10-28 10:22:32

  Hash Tables in Javascript

IntroductionHash tables are a permutation of associative arrays (i.e. name => value pairs). If you use PHP, then you are very familiar with this type of data structure already since all PHP arrays are associative.The Javascript language implements very loose and somewhat limited support for associative arrays. Any JavaScript array can use other objects as keys, making it a hash, but there exists no formal constructor for initializing them and it is more or less unweildy to work with. A short ...

   JavaScript,Hashtable,Implementation,Array     2011-11-26 02:43:40

  PHP Sucks! But I Like It!

I read a rather interesting post yesterday called PHP: a fractal of bad design. It's been getting a lot of traffic among the PHP community lately because it's rather inflammatory. But to be honest, it does make a lot of really good points. It also makes a lot of mistakes and misses a bigger picture. A Few Mistakes The post makes quite a few mistakes and odd apples to oranges comparisons. Let me point out the major ones that I saw. No Debugger - PHP has xdebug which works quite...

   PHP,Bad design,Like     2012-04-12 06:15:42

  Haskell’s effect on my C++: exploit the type system

Like most programmers, I was attracted to Scheme by the promise that it would make me a better programmer. I came to appreciate the functional style, but swapped to Haskell, a more developed language with a rapidly developing standard library. Unfortunately, for me, Haskell can’t yet replace C++ on a day to day basis, so I reluctantly spend my days tapping away at C++. So, were the promises true? has functional programming made me a better programmer? Better is a tough question,...

   Haskell,C++,Type system,Comparison     2012-02-06 07:44:35

  One thought about JavaScript exception handle

Due to network, browser and cache issues, the JS executed in production may produce different results from the testing environments. Sometimes they may produce exceptions. Front-end developers may encounter this kind of exceptions frequently. But how to log and use them is seldomly considered by them. Actually, exception handling includes two steps : log and use. 1. Log Regarding to log error, this is relatively convenient, since in each browser, there is one interface called window.onerror. win...

   JaavScript,Log,Exception,Email     2013-03-18 12:50:21

  40+ Techniques to enhance your php code

1. Do not use relative paths , instead define a ROOT path Its quite common to see such lines : 1require_once('../../lib/some_class.php'); This approach has many drawbacks : It first searches for directories specified in the include paths of php , then looks from the current directory. So many directories are checked. When a script is included by another script in a different directory , its base directory changes to that of the including script. Another issue , is that when a script is being ru...

   PHP,Quirk,Trick,Efficiency,Techniques     2012-04-10 13:06:55

  The worst program I ever worked on

Most contract jobs fade pretty quickly in memory after the work is done, but some you remember for the rest of your life. This is one of the latter variety. This happened long ago, at a (fair sized) company that shall remain nameless. The software was a chunk of code that had been maintained by a single guy that had been fired recently and was a core component of a commercial system. So far nothing unusual, companies tend to find out that they have a piece of critical knowledge in one head all ...

   Program,worst     2011-03-17 13:58:36

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