These are great: Programming principles from id software
I read How Did Things Ever Get This Good? today. Nice, short, optimistic piece.
I came across these Programming Quotes over on cat-v.org today. Their Bumper-Sticker Computer Science is also good.
My favourite was “You can’t trust code that you did not totally create yourself.” — Ken Thompson
Just read the Design by Contract article on Wikipedia… a good read!
Doing some research on Peter Norvig (I’m fascinated by the guy and want to know what he thinks) and I found a talk of his: Peter Norvig: What to demand from a Scientific Computing Language. In the talk Peter explains what he wants out of a programming language and why he feels that Python fits the bill.
I watched the whole thing but I think I’ll put it on my TODO list to watch this again one day.
I was just confirming my understanding that JavaScript numbers are 64-bit (i.e. double precision) floats on all platforms and I stumbled upon this old article from Douglas Crockford: A Survey of the JavaScript Programming Language.
I’m sick and tired of seeing Google’s bullshit “this stuff matters” advertising as part of their latest privacy policy update (which I’ve been doing my best to ignore).
As I was complaining about it I thought I’d try and find some examples of their hypocrisy. I’m fairly sure I’ve seen articles before where people said their job for a Google interview was to process gigabytes of web logs. If you’re data-mining web logs to *spy* on people on the one hand and then telling people you’re protecting their privacy on the other hand then you’re a lying sack of shit really, aren’t you?
Anyway, I didn’t find what I was looking for in a big hurry and I don’t really have time for this, so I’m giving up on my little fact finding mission and just going back to ignoring the whole thing.
However, during my web search I found this article, My Job Interview at Google, which seems like a fairly content rich article. I’m particularly interested in the resources that the guy linked to in his post. So figured I’d swing by my blog and make a note so that when I have some free time (hey, could happen) I can go over that post and read the reference material.
A friend of mine send me a link to 30 books everyone in software business should read (and why). I’ve read a few of the books on the list, but I’ll have another look when I have some more free time.
Just recently I read Zed Shaw’s Advice From An Old Programmer, and in it he says:
I’ve been programming for a very long time. So long that it’s incredibly boring to me.
That’s been in the back of my mind for a few days, and something I’ve been thinking about as I hope for people to join ProgClub. It seems to me that the longer you program the less you are interested in programming. But, it takes time to be a good programmer, so the better you get, the less interested you become. ProgClub wants first and foremost people who are *interested* in programming, and secondly it wants people who are *good* at programming. Though it doesn’t seem like there are going to be that many good programmers out there who are going to have the time or the interest for ProgClub. Which means that ProgClub’s best bet is probably to encourage participation from enthusiastic beginners.