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Question Best Practices
In software development we have best practices. These are the distilled wisdom of software engineering, and you should follow best practices to be a good software developer, and to develop good software. If someone points out you broke them, that should be sufficient to make you mend your ways. This is what the term "best practices" implies to me . There are different, more subtle interpretations, but I think this interpretation is a reasonable one and in actual usage. Let's go into its problems. …
I Was a 1980s Teenage Programmer Part 5: Achieving Assembly
Part five in a series about my teenage adventures learning about computers and programming in the 1980s: achieving assembly
I Was a 1980s Teenage Programmer Part 4: The Call of Assembly
Part four in a series about my teenage adventures learning about computers and programming in the 1980s: the call of assembly language.
The Tooling Shift
Tool maven versus language maven. Do modern development environments enable you to be both? How does this affect languages?
I Was a 1980s Teenage Programmer Part 3: MSX-2
Part three in a series about my teenage adventures learning about computers and programming in the 1980s: the MSX 2 computer.
JavaScript: when you need two ways to do it!
Wherein we discover JavaScript always gives you a choice.
Empowering Programming Languages
I think, for me, becoming enamored by a programming language requires a sense of empowerment by that language. "Now I can build all the things!" It also requires a certain sense of conceptual unity; it can't be too messy. It also cannot be too low level: it needs the ability to do abstraction. And I need to be actually using it a lot for real world tasks; it can't just be for toy problems. In my developer life there are two languages I have become truly enamored by. Python in 1998 and Rust, a few years ago. I have appreciated other languages but this is more. …
Bloat and Retrofuturism
Developers like to complain about bloat in software. But should we feel guilty? What do to about it? Do we need software environmentalism and a retrofuturistic approach?
Refreshing my Blog Again
I've refreshed my blog again! Let's talk a bit about the history of this blog, and more specifically the technology behind it. I started my blog in January 2005. It's been a while. …