How complexity killed the best bug ever created in the whole world.
Python’s attributes are not Java’s getters/setters and why that’s a good thing.
If it is ever discovered, we would have known about it a long time ago.
Originally published in The Psychological Review, 1956, vol. 63, pp. 81-97. Every once in a while the internet decides to be useful and floats something old and amazing around anew. This is one of those things.
Tom Preston-Werner shows you how to think.
Christian Neukirchen’s Ruby styleguide. The best I’ve seen.
I never put it together that the teddziuba that wrote at lesscode.org in 2005 was that teddziuba. This is a great piece.
I’ve linked to this before and I’ll link to it again.
“… the implications of many of the scientific ideas and theories, whether mine or otherwise, are indeed immoral, ugly, contrary to our ideals, or offensive either to men or women (or some other groups of people). I simply do not care. If what I say is wrong (because it is illogical or lacks credible scientific evidence), then it is my problem. If what I say offends you, it is your problem.”
Interesting look at evolution of UI and the semi-recent trend of adopting the web’s content oriented interface. Definitely overlaps with the fundamentals of “admin debris” and related ideas.
“You (and I) suck. Plan for it. Expect it. Get over it.”
“… in every one of these processes and diagrams there is a box which basically says ‘write the code’, and ought to be subtitled ‘(and here a miracle occurs)’.”
Ethan Vizitei on the difference in productivity found in the middle of the night vs. any other time of day. Nails it, IMO.
Rafe kicks off a series detailing various aspects of his coding philosophy. The first is near and dear to my heart: less code
Okay, I’ve read about five of these articles purporting to explain Git’s internal conceptual framework. This was the first that really made things click in any significant way.
“A million lines of code is not ten times more than 100,000. It’s well-known that schedules grow faster than the code … so the schedule for developing a million lines of code is 22 times bigger than for 100,000 LOC.”
“The Algorithm’s coming-of-age as the new language of science promises to be the most disruptive scientific development since quantum mechanics.”
“Most of the time you should be working on The Next Most Important Thing. But there are times when it’s okay to depart. Times when you need to depressurize after completing a dive in the stressful, complex pool of Big Problems.”
“What if closures and meta-programming and expressive type systems and annotations and all of the other tools that give us the power to build powerful abstractions actually don’t scale to larger teams?”
“… coined by Ward Cunningham to describe the obligation that a software organization incurs when it chooses a design or construction approach that’s expedient in the short term but that increases complexity and is more costly in the long term.”
Now this is an interesting theory on John Gabriel’s GIFWT.
Color theory for computer interface designers.
“Talking about a software development schedule more than a year out is like talking about where we go after we die. Everyone has some idea where we’ll end up, but those ideas differ wildly, and there’s a lack of solid evidence to support any of them.”
“There is an important tradeoff between the computational power of a language and the ability to determine what a program in that language is doing.”
“It was as if its architects were given a perfectly good hammer and gleefully replied, ‘neat! With this hammer, we can build a tool that can pound in nails.’” — that is THE SINGLE FUNNIEST SENTENCE ever assembled in the history of english language!
“There’s no one programmer who does the work of ten other programmers. One uber-programmer does just as much work as one ordinary programmer. It’s just that the results solve ten times as many problems.”
“I actually think YAGNI and Othello’s waiting moves embody the same concept. Both are brilliant, winning strategies. Yet, there’s a certain emotional side to YAGNI and software development. We tend to get attached to our good ideas.”
“I consider being able to return a procedural value, and to have first class procedures in general, as being essential to doing very good modular programming.” — Gerald Sussman (PS: how come nobody told me you can link to specific time offsets in google
Follow it.
I have no idea how I missed this. Great Yegge piece from October 2004.
let’s go back to ‘97
It’s impossible for diffuse flames (jet fuel, paper, office stuff) to reach temperatures needed to melt steel. This guy thinks there were thermite charges in the buildings.
I do this all the time…
“This leads to my point: In computer science, nothing [still] makes sense [even] if you violate the identity principle.” :)
Audio excerpts from recent PBS/NOVA program celebrating “E = mc2”
Godel would be proud, I think…
Right on…
Ouch! It would have been so much cooler if Java would have just dropped static typing completely.. :)
Fuck yea, Len..
Some interesting thoughts on Gödel’s Proof and its implications on nonstandard numbers.
“People have been freaking out about the virtuality of data for decades, and you’d think we’d have internalized the obvious truth: there is no shelf.”
What the Internet Is and How to Stop Mistaking It for Something Else.
Wow, this may be the most serendipitous page I’ve come across on the c2 wiki. It starts with strategies for when generalization is okay, leads into caveman number systems, how many objects the brain can recognize without counting, God as Lisp programmer,
Yea, this is the coolest thing I’ve read in a long time. Tim: let me borrow that “Gödel, Escher, Bach” book – I’ll tear that shit up in a night, I swear…
How programs adhere to the basic laws of Darwinian evolution.. Seems to gel with everything I’ve learned.
Bill de hÓra describes the major flaw in high level languages like Python..
Sam Ruby trying to put a definition to the word “simple”. Seriously, it’s not as easy to define as you think.
Sorry, I can’t stop linking to this guy…
When did I die and how the hell did I end up in heaven? Crazy!
“… the opposite of fear may be curiosity.”
Goddam this is an awesome essay on how bad software is written..
“Someone who points out a problem early is a troublemaker; someone who fixes a problem at the last minute is a hero.”
The whole PDF requirement at ChangeThis sucks but this looks like a good read anyway..
The author of the widely praised Baroque Cycle on science, markets, and post-9/11 America
Dijkstra is a complete badass.
Doesn’t this qualify as a genetic algorithm?
AKA: “how to avoid the language war..” must read!
Finally hits 1.0. If you read one big nasty spec this year, this should be it. It’s actually full of stories and other weird stuff that make portions kind of fun.
The story of Worse is Better.
mmmmm.. mangos.. yum.
timeless..
A bunch of Knuth talks and experiments. Some video, audio, book excerpts, etc.
Neal Stephenson on UNIX.
On del.icio.us style tags and how they differ from existing keyword and category styles of classification.
Bosworth gets it..
because it isn’t mine.
Old and still very valid. What’s the best mix of Simplicity, Correctness, Consistency, and Completeness in software design? Describes MIT and “NewJersey” approaches.