There’s still a lot of important dialogue about the standard features of modern programming languages that hasn’t happened yet.
A quote from Raganwald: “The correct response is not calling arbitrary features ‘magic’. It’s programming. That’s all.”
I fear that I'm beginning to sound like a stuck record by now, but I can't help attempting to push back against that particular form of inertia that has infected our discipline. First I saw this,…
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…
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
Watch the cascade from Ruby is Unix to Python is Unix to Perl is Unix.
I always enjoy reading interviews and discussions with Larry Wall - a brilliant language designer whose unconventional wisdom and humor makes his explanations of complex and chaotic issues seem…
Builder is a completely declarative library which makes it easy to generate XML from a cascade of Ruby method calls. But it's not completely smooth sending: working on an Atom feed, I ran into a…
The process is just as straightforward on OS X as it is on Windows - if you do things manually. The catch for me was that I needed to set up a script to automate the process. Normally, OS X expects…
Why and MenTaLguY show how to upwink javascript into web requests - is this a replacement for Greasemonkey, or just total insanity?
_why has gone. Left the intarwebs. And in the process, he tore down the house, and leveled the garden.
I've had a massive pile of code and experiments sitting around for too long. It's time to move on, but I thought, why not throw it out to rot instead of just disposing of it? Who knows, the stuff…
Why is one person who cares about children learning to program, if Cut Holes In Shoes And Get A Mask is anything to go by. Many people would think this is completely insane, or merely reinventing…
No programming language is appropriate for every situation.
This piece landed in my inbox twice today, and immediately caught my attention. It's well written, and makes some excellent points that I think are exactly on the mark. Paul Graham has elaborated…