maetl

Languages

Most Programmers Are Stupid

“The only thing that everyone seems to agree upon is how stupid all the other programmers are.”

Only Magic to Those with Inadequate Understanding

A quote from Raganwald: “The correct response is not calling arbitrary features ‘magic’. It’s programming. That’s all.”

The Axes of Parsing

This is an introductory guide to the theory and praxis of parsing and lexical analysis. All this material is a necessary basic foundation to the study of parsing.

Overloading the MQL Acronym

MQL must be one of the most overused acronyms in todays technology field, including (but definitely not limited to) such specificities as search/analytics, automated trading, and molecular substructure…

10 LET M EQ MIND ROT 20 GOTO 10

I hate to agree with grouchy old Dijkstra, but unfortunately now it's impossible to deny: BASIC is what killed my ability to be a truly great programmer. Dijkstra was right, GOTO completely rots your…

Redefining Computing

As I am now starting to discover, many of these ideas were originally considered by Alan Kay, and summarized at OOPSLA in 1997. If the true shape of object oriented programming is qualitatively…

Thoughts of a Lonely Programmer

The writer is doubtless stricken with writers block And can thus, for weeks, vanish into a myriad of dark rooms Where conversation dangles under glistening rows of liquor. The programmer is expected…

What is Missing from Modern Programming Languages?

There’s still a lot of important dialogue about the standard features of modern programming languages that hasn’t happened yet.

Code is Not Inevitable

If crap code is an unavoidable problem for the software industry, maybe the solution lies in trying to change the nature of the code, rather than trying to change the people who write the code.

The Missing Literary Traditions of Programming

Learning how to forget the properties of programming languages themselves, and think about the context of what is actually written in these languages.

Undocumenting PHP: Static Late Binding

PHP is flawed. Deeply, immensely so. I first discovered this over a year ago, when I made the naive assumption that PHP 5.1 had fixed a lot of the language level failings of its predecessor. Because…

Is PHP Doomed?

There's a tide of opinion suggesting that PHP is threatened with extinction as standard hardware begins to favour widening multicore processors. This would be a fair argument if PHP was a general…

The Myth of The Next Big Language

It's not a showdown between Javascript and Ruby, it's a race towards bioware. Language oriented programming is not a new idea, but it has taken a long time to become a significant influence on…

Thinking Beyond Java

Last year, I picked up this curious book which seemed to sum up the zeitgeist of web programming in 2005 - an interesting and polemical twist from O'Reilly

Signs, Sigils, and Syntax

Why do we call programming languages “languages”? What is missing from the literary traditions of programming?

The Landscape of Computing

People think that it is strange that someone like me who knows so much about programming languages chooses to program in PHP so frequently. They're probably right, and I appreciate where…

Membrane Oriented Programming

For many years, Object Oriented discourse has been far too constrained by language oriented thinking.

Py3000

Python 3.0a1 release hits the network, with significant backwards incompatible changes. The best way to describe this is a shedding of the snake's skin, sloughing off a whole bunch of weird ambiguities…

Java Chases Its Tail Calls

John Rose talks about implementing support for tail call optimization in the JVM. I've been waiting for this one, as in my mind, it has long been one of the biggest holes in the leaky dike of…

March of the Straw Men and the Language Ecosystem

No programming language is appropriate for every situation.