Posts tagged ‘programming’
Rich programmer food »
Steve Yegge, on why programmers should write compilers:
Whenever I gave even a moment’s thought to whether I needed to learn compilers, I’d think: I would need to know how compilers work in one of two scenarios. The first scenario is that I go work at Microsoft and somehow wind up in the Visual C++ group. Then I’d need to know how compilers work. The second scenario is that the urge suddenly comes upon me to grow a long beard and stop showering and make a pilgrimage to MIT where I beg Richard Stallman to let me live in a cot in some hallway and work on GCC with him like some sort of Jesuit vagabond.
The Perl 6 project is ten years old »
Carl Masak looks back over the past ten years of Perl 6’s development, from its catalyst and initial design, to budding implementations.
jsoup HTML parser launches
Today, I am announcing the public beta launch of jsoup, an open source Java HTML parser for dealing with real-world HTML.
API design matters »
Michi Henning writes about the cost of bad APIs, and how to design good interfaces:
A great way to get usable APIs is to let the customer (namely, the caller) write the function signature, and to give that signature to a programmer to implement. This step alone eliminates at least half of poor APIs: too often, the implementers of APIs never use their own creations, with disastrous consequences for usability. Moreover, an API is not about programming, data structures, or algorithms—an API is a user interface, just as much as a GUI. The user at the using end of the API is a programmer—that is, a human being. Even though we tend to think of APIs as machine interfaces, they are not: they are human-machine interfaces.
Announcing Unicode Lookup
Over the weekend I built Unicode Lookup, a tool that lets you search for any Unicode character by name, or by codepoint number. A table of the characters with their decimal, octal, hex, and HTML entity representations is shown as results.
Oddball “DRM” on MISaustralia.com
Have a look at this article on MISaustralia. The first sign that something’s awry is their use of a monospace font for body copy.
Now try selecting some of the body text: only every second letter gets highlighted.
Take a look at the HTML source and you see this is deliberate: they are using JavaScript to overlay [...]
Microsoft releases pre-07 Office file specs »
Microsoft has released the specifications to the file formats in the pre-2007 Office suite.
The Microsoft Office binary file formats documentation provides detailed technical specifications for the .doc, .ppt .xls, and .xlsb file formats as created by the following Microsoft Office applications:
- .doc: Microsoft Word 97, Microsoft Word 2000, Microsoft Word 2002, Microsoft Office Word 2003, Microsoft Office Word 2007
- .ppt: Microsoft PowerPoint 97, Microsoft PowerPoint 2000, Microsoft PowerPoint 2002, Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003, Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007
- .xls: Microsoft Excel 97, Microsoft Excel 2000, Microsoft Excel 2002, Microsoft Office Excel 2003, Microsoft Office Excel 2007
- .xlsb: Microsoft Office Excel 2007
Review: On the Edge: the Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore
On the Edge, by Brian Bagnell, tells the history of Commodore, from their entry into and development of the personal computer industry, to their massive collapse just 15 years later.
Jared Tarbell’s Gallery of Computation »
A beautiful set of digital artworks, mostly created in Processing. Source code is included.
My favourite is Substrate, which I’ve been running as my screensaver. It looks like crystals growing, or an aerial view of a city developing.
Review: Programming Collective Intelligence
Programming Collective Intelligence is a book about applying data mining techniques to analyse collections of data. There is submerged information in Ebay prices, in Facebook profile networks, in collections of movie reviews, in news sites, in the stockmarket; this book by Toby Segaran shows ways to extract, visualise, understand, and predict that information.