Tag Archives: programming

Learnable Programming, Bret Victor, and Other Two Word Phrases

Posted by svec on September 29, 2012 0 comments

Bret Victor just published his latest essay, “Learnable Programming.” In “Learnable Programming” Bret criticizes the Khan Academy’s latest “interactive” programming education tools and suggests a better way to teach programming. He footnotes the essay with this summary: This essay was an immune response, triggered by hearing too many times that Inventing on Principle was “about [...]

Ruby reminds me of Tcl.

Posted by svec on August 10, 2012 0 comments

Ruby reminds me of Tcl. It feels like it’s strings all the way down. It’s not a bad thing, it’s just a thing. I kinda like Tcl, actually. File under: things-I-should-have-probably-tweeted

Technology vs. Psychology

Posted by svec on May 11, 2009 3 comments

Do you write software for a living?  Or design hardware?  Or maybe some of each?  While the particular projects any two software or hardware designers do may be worlds apart, we can characterize what we do in the same way: our work is 20% technology and 80% psychology. Most of the work we do is [...]

How to tell you’re a bad programmer

Posted by svec on December 7, 2008 0 comments

How to tell you’re a bad programmer: 1. You think you’re an awesome programmer. 2. But no one else has ever told you so. 3. You’ve never looked at old code you wrote and thought, “Ewwww! That is horrible code! What was I thinking???” 4. You’ve never looked at someone else’s code and thought, “Dang, [...]

Using Stack Overflow

Posted by svec on June 26, 2008 0 comments

Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood are starting a new website called Stack Overflow, it’s going to be a free programming Q&A website. I’m a fan of both of those guys (I even have an autographed copy of Joel’s book!), so I signed up to be a beta user to see how it develops. I was [...]

Data is more agile than code

Posted by svec on June 16, 2008 0 comments

Peter Norvig talks about the need for a startup company to go fast – and also in the right direction – at his Startup School 2008 talk. “Sure you gotta go fast, but if you’re not getting feedback to figure out if you’re going in the right direction it doesn’t matter how fast you go.” [...]

Knuth hates XP

Posted by svec on April 25, 2008 0 comments

In this recent interview, Donald Knuth says: “Still, I hate to duck your questions even though I also hate to offend other people’s sensibilities—given that software methodology has always been akin to religion. With the caveat that there’s no reason anybody should care about the opinions of a computer scientist/mathematician like me regarding software development, [...]

Understanding C pointers: Part 1

Posted by svec on January 1, 2008 3 comments

As I said in “Understanding C pointers: Part 0,” I’m going to try to explain how C pointers work. Let’s start with the basics. Here’s some simple C code: int x = 23; int y = x; You can think of each variable as a box which holds the value of that variable. So in [...]

Understanding C pointers: Part 0

Posted by svec on December 28, 2007 2 comments

“C/C++ Pointers are evil. Ditto direct control of memory via malloc, free, new and delete. Java, C# and other ’safe’ languages are the wave of the future, man!” Even if you shouted a hearty, “Amen, brother!” after reading those sentences, the C/C++ languages can teach you something useful. Understanding how to directly control memory with [...]