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  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

  Programming is a Super Power

In a society where technology and the Internet have become incredibly prominent elements of our daily lives, being able to program is akin to having a super power. In fact, a programmer is able to not only easily interact with cutting edge technology, but also to take advantage of said technology to transform pure thoughts into something as tangible and useful as software.I would argue that there has never been a more exciting time for being able to program. While being a part of our industry ba...

   Programming,Programmer,Super power     2011-04-01 00:12:13

  C programming tips in SPARC architecture

If you are a newbie of C programmers in SPARC architecture (For example, working on Solaris), you should pay attention to the following tips:(1) By default, SPARC is big-endian (For Endianness, you can refer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness). It means for an integer (short, int, long, etc), the MSB will be stored in the lower address, while the LSB will be stored in the higher address. (2) SPARC requires byte-alignment. It means for a short (2 bytes long) variable, the star...

   C     2014-06-01 03:56:30

  Accessing Reddit top posts using OAuth

Previously one can use the https://www.reddit.com/r/rprogramming/top.json API to access one subreddit's top posts. This API doesn't require any access token to fetch the data. However, this API may not work all the time. Reddit may block the API's request if it finds that you are using a script or some app which accesses the API now and then. For an app or script which needs to fetch the data routinely, what should we do? Reddit provides one method which can be used to fetch this kind of to...

   REDDIT,OAUTH,TOP POSTS,HOT POSTS     2023-12-16 07:24:14

  Building an iPhone application.

One of my New Years resolutions was to finally learn the iOS SDK and build a 'real' application.I am happy to report that progress is going really well and wanted to share something that I have noticed about iOS programming.It only looks scary... it's not. It's actually very easy.Now, I am not building Mail, Angry Birds or Photosynth or anything, but the core concepts of the SDK are not that bad once you spend some time learning delegation. If you don't understand delegation, iOS programmi...

   Apple,iOS,Application development     2012-01-28 07:03:36

  The Hungry Programmer

Programming is a lot like eating. Tonight I was hungry. I wasn't at home. I couldn't go to the kitchen for a snack. I looked around and saw only McDonald's across the street. Then I was struck with the same dilemma that I face whenever I leave the comfort of my own home for any decent spread of time: Do I eat crappy food now and satisfy that hunger? Or do I stay hungry for a little longer and eat a healthy meal back at home? As I pondered this dilemma I couldn't help but notice how much i...

   Programmer,Hungry,Coder,Coding     2012-01-19 11:04:30

  Readability in Programming Languages

I saw a side by side comparison of a bunch of scripting languages online recently. Scripting Languages: PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby My first, and second reaction was yuck! Now I have my biases – biases which may  not be shared by others of course. But I like readable code and for me anytime I see a special character (anything not an alphanumeric) it slows me down. This got me thinking about where we are going in design of programming languages? Are we moving forward (what ever ...

   Programming,Style,Coding style,Readabili     2011-09-22 09:20:03

  JavaScript programming style

Douglas Crockford is a JavaScript expert, he is the inventor of JSON. In November 2011 he made a speech "Youtube", during the speech he talked about what JavaScript programming style is.I recommend this speech to everyone, it not only helps you learn JavaScript but also make you enjoying because Crockford is very humorous and he made audience laugh frequently.Next I will summarize JavaScript programming style according to this speech and his article code convention. The so-called programming ...

   JavaScript, programming style,Curly braces,Equal     2015-10-14 10:16:44

  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

  Is coding going to die?

There is always a voice recent years saying that coding will gradually die, software development is more like an assembly job. i.e, programmer will be more and more like IT engineers. They seldom build something from scratch, instead they achieve the goal by assemble different components. There are people who have similar views around me. From the book "Clean code" written by Robert C Martin-- "One might argue that a book about code is somehow behind the times—that code is no longer...

   Coding,Clean code,Disappear,Analysis     2012-03-15 14:37:35