Really interesting article from Rob Pike, a member of the Unix team and Plan 9. Here’s a short excerpt from the article: “Kernighan and Plauger’s The Elements of Programming Style was an important and rightly influential book. But sometimes I feel its concise rules were taken as a cookbook approach to good style instead of [...]

Just a few excellent responses from Stackoverflow.com to the question: “What programming terms have you coined that have taken off in your own circles (i.e. have heard others repeat it)? It might be within your own team, workplace or garnered greater popularity on the Internet.” Some examples being: “Yoda Conditions” and “Pokemon Exception Handling.” Dodgy [...]

The Doom 3 source code has recently been released under the GPL license by iD Software and it appears that someone has been able to successfully build it under OS X! There is also a small/partial code review of sorts here too with plans for a complete code review in the future. Check out the [...]

Dart is a new web programming language developed by Google. It is set to be first unveiled at the GOTO conference, which is held between October 10-12, 2011. The primary intent of Dart is to replace JavaScript. The primary goals of Dart are to solve some of JavaScript’s problems while providing increased performance and security. [...]

Most programmers know the typical set of languages, such as C, C++, PHP, Java, etc. These are mainstream languages and used by many. However, there are hundreds or thousands of languages out there; some of which are extremely interesting and sometimes experimental in nature. Here is a quick list of some interesting languages to check [...]

source: Technical Papers Every Programmer Should Read (blog.fogus.me) Fundamental Concepts in Programming Languages  by Christopher Strachey Why Functional Programming Matters  by John Hughes An Axiomatic Basis for Computer Programming  by C. A. R. HOARE Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System  by Leslie Lamport (1978) On Understanding Types, Data Abstraction, and [...]

“The best candidate I have been able to come up with is the C/Unix/Posix use of NUL-terminated text strings. The choice was really simple: Should the C language represent strings as an address + length tuple or just as the address with a magic character (NUL) marking the end? This is a decision that the [...]

via Evolution of Computer Languages (via rackspace.com/cloud/blog)

I’ve begun messing around with Node.js in my spare time. I don’t really have a normal project idea in mind per se, but I have started to upload some of the examples and other small applications I’ve been creating. I’m still learning more about the Node.js JavaScript event-driven I/O framework and I will continue posting [...]

Are you occasionally stuck on a really hard programming task where you’re not sure how to proceed and you end up being unproductive (procrastinating)? This article (softwarecreation.org) describes in detail an effective method of breaking down difficult tasks to make them easier to approach and conquer. Below is a quick outline of the process described [...]