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  Letter to a Young Developer

I’ve been getting some emails from young developers wanting to “level up” as programmers. I’m definitely not the first to write about this topic, so I’m not sure how much I have to add. Still, for what it’s worth here are a few points off the top of my head: Work with other developers. We are at a wonderful time in the history of technology when for the first time, it doesn’t really matter where you are or who you are working for. So long as you ...

   Letter,Tips,Programmer,Developer,Opportu     2011-09-14 11:49:24

  A Better Way to Learn How to Program

Learning how to program can be a nightmare. An aspiring coder has to jump through many unpleasant hoops and mysterious error messages just to get "Hello, World!" printed on the screen. Then, she's left wondering, "OK, now what? How do I actually build something?"As game developers seeing someone struggle through this, we should be screaming, “NOOOOO!” The whole thing reeks of bad game design: a lot of work with no reward, unclear failure cases, advanced features pushed on new players...

   Programming pattern,Game design,Derivati     2011-09-19 13:51:17

  Java vs F#

Dr Cliff Click of Azul Systems, specialists in manycore JVM systems, recently published a blog post about the performance of Java compared primarily to C and C++ but also discussing C# and .NET. Three of Cliff's comments are of particular interest:Under the heading "Places where C/C++ beats Java for obvious reasons":"Value Types, such as a 'Complex' type require a full object in Java." - Dr Cliff ClickWhat Cliff forgot to mention is that .NET also provides value types and a far more compell...

   Java,F#,Performance,JVM     2012-03-07 05:07:31

  Understanding GoLang interface

If goroutine and channel are considered as the foundation for GoLang concurrency, interface would be the key for data types in GoLang. In practical Go programming, almost all data types are built/used around interfaces, interface is the core of GoLang data structures. Go is not a typical OOP language, it has no class and inheritance concept syntactically. But it doesn't mean that there cannot be polymorphism in GoLang. Because of interface, it achieves the same polymorphism effect as in C++, tho...

   INTERFACE,GOLANG     2021-05-15 04:16:42

  Illiterate Programming

Donald Knuth cleverly imprisoned the phrase "Literate Programming" - if you're not documenting your source with his particular methodology then you must be a proponent of "Illiterate Programming," which sounds truly awful. I very much believe in documented code but I think no amount of pontification in English will ever make a piece of code clearer than the code itself (I'm not talking about project or API documentation). I'm also not talking about the super...

   Programming,Illiterate     2012-02-10 06:20:52

  All Programmers Are Self-Taught

When I was a teenager I played high caliber baseball. I’m competitive to a fault and when I decide I want to be good at something, results usually follow. Now I’m a third year undergrad studying computer science. There’s something critically different between programming and sports though: A pitching coach teaches you how to pitch, but a CS professor doesn’t teach you how to code. I was surprised that neither my TAs nor professors critiqued my code during my firs...

   Programming,Style,Habit,Self learning     2011-12-21 10:25:50

  In praise of impractical programming

Although it’s become a cultural mainstay now, I still remember when I first saw that thick book — the one with the wizard on the cover — about a school for magic where wonders are easily conjured by those who know the proper spells. Of course, I’m talking about the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. There was that other book with the spells, but the “Wizard Book” sincerely claimed to teach magic. For the past few years, I’ve been ...

   Impractical Programming,Structure,Scheme,Practical     2011-12-05 12:28:58

  Before Python

This morning I had a chat with the students at Google's CAPE program. Since I wrote up what I wanted to say I figured I might as well blog it here. Warning: this is pretty unedited (or else it would never be published :-). I'm posting it in my "personal" blog instead of the "Python history" blog because it mostly touches on my career before Python. Here goes.Have you ever written a computer program? Using which language?HTMLJavascriptJavaPythonC++COther - which?[It turned out the students ha...

   Python,History,Programming language,B     2012-01-18 08:08:53

  Socket programming tips in Solaris

I sponsored a topic in stackoverflow.com, and hoped the programmers can share the socket programming tips in different UNIX flavors. But unfortunately, the responders are few. So I can only share my socket programming tips in Solaris at here (the Chinese version can be found there): 1. Use the following link options: "-lresolv -lnsl -lsocket";2. Solaris doesn't provide socket options: SO_SNDTIMEO and SO_RCVTIMEO(Why does Solaris OS define SO_SNDTIMEO and SO_RCVTIMEO socket options...

   C,Solaris,socket,     2014-05-09 23:01:03

  Why I Still Use Emacs

At school, I’m known as the Emacs guy; when people have questions about configuring Emacs or making it work a certain way, they often come and ask me. Sometimes, some people ask me why use Emacs at all? Isn’t it a really old editor and aren’t Eclipse or Visual Studio much better? I mean, they don’t have weird key bindings and have intellisense, that’s surely better for a programmer, right? I will attempt in this post to explain some of the reasons why I still c...

   Linux,Emacs,Editor,Advantage,IDE     2012-02-20 05:30:41

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