The practice of developing software depends on a large body of arcane knowledge and skills. Almost all of this knowledge is based on logical principles and built up to the point that we can do amazing work. Because programming has it’s roots in applied mathematics, there is an impression that programming is also a logical,… Read More »
Despite being convinced that we are rational people, many programmers or software types can be rabid about our favorite technologies. If you want to hear a passionate opinion, ask about favorite programming editor, programming language, or operating system. If you want to start a fight, suggest that the preference is not an objective decision. That… Read More »
While I was at YAPC::NA this year, I got a chance to catch up with a few old friends and talk with some really knowledgeable people from other parts of the Perl programming community. One such discussion started when Rob Kinyon told me that exceptions are fundamentally flawed by design and should never be used.… Read More »
At the beginning of last year, I wrote Programming for/by Kids talking about my experience getting my young son programming using the Scratch language. Shortly after I wrote that piece, he lost interest and stopped. As usual, something else caught his attention and he was off working on that. When I noticed that he wasn’t… Read More »
At the end of 2008, I did a series of posts arguing that SVG still lives despite predictions of it’s downfall. I had been hearing these dire predictions for years, and wanted to provide a decent rebuttal: Reports of SVG’s death exaggerated. Last year, I had the good fortune to go to SVG Open 2009.… Read More »
I just got back from YAPC::NA 2010. As usual, the presentations were great and the people were better. At last year’s YAPC, I had the good fortune to attend a talk by Karen Pauley entitled Remote Controlled Volunteers. It’s not the kind of talk I would normally look for, but I thought I would check… Read More »
A comment on the Security Now Podcast got me thinking about the concept of write-only languages. Many times over my career, I’ve heard people refer to a language as write only. The implication being that no one can read the code once its written. This phrase does not refer to some magical IP technology that… Read More »
Back in February, I ran across the post robkinyon on Perl: How useful is a debugger, really? and was again reminded of the great debugging debate. I thought about commenting on it at the time, but I got distracted. Well, Matt Trout reminded me of it again today with his post Simple Debugging. So, I… Read More »
In the past few months, I have been focusing more on SVG. The most important reason was the SVG Open 2009 conference the first weekend of October.1 Some truly amazing demos and research are being done in this area despite nay-sayers claiming that the technology is dead. Some of the biggest announcements leading up to… Read More »
There has been a lot of talk lately about projects moving to git. So far I the write-ups from people converting to git have all been glowing endorsements of the new one, true way. There’s almost a religious fervor related to the subject. Since my experience has not been quite that good, I thought it… Read More »