I expect this one will upset a lot of people. It’s also a lie. But not as big a lie as you might think. Fighting the Language When I was starting out in programming, there was a statement that was pretty popular: “A bad programmer can write Fortran in any language.” This was not really… Read More »
In almost every field, people will grab onto some belief without any (rational) reason. Programmers often act and seem to believe that they are actually rational people and would not hold an irrational belief (at least where our field is concerned). When you look at your fellow developers, you can usually spot counter-examples. Like many… Read More »
One problem with comparing different programming languages is finding a valid comparison. It’s pretty hard to really compare two different languages. On the other hand, it’s pretty easy to compare example code from the two languages. Unfortunately, comparing code examples is likely to run into Sturgeon’s Revelation, or Sturgeon’s Law: 90% of everything is crap.… 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 »
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 »
I was listening to an older episode of Software Engineering Radio where they interviewed Martin Odersky on Scala (Episode 62). In the interview, Odersky made a comment about closures being the literals of functional programming. This statement struck me as surprising. The more I thought about it, the more interesting and subtle the concept became.… Read More »
My son has talked several times about learning to program, but he’s young enough that the normal programming approaches bore him. I had tried implementations of Logo in the past, without much success. A couple months ago, I was checking the Make magazine blog and stumbled upon an article about a Scrolling Mario game in… Read More »
Yesterday, I wrote an essay on a comment made in Jeff Atwood’s Coding Horrors blog about regular expressions. While Atwood spends quite a bit of time on the two problems joke and talks passionately about regexes as a tool, he does take a swipe at the Perl programming language that seemed somewhat uncalled for. I… Read More »
One of the dimensions in which you can vary a design is in terms of the amount of flexibility it supports. Trade-offs along this dimension show up in many design decisions for various kinds of software. In some cases, software is made less flexible to improve predictability. In other cases, the adaptability of the software… Read More »