So when I started programming in 2001, it was du jour in the communities I participated in to be highly critical of other languages. Other languages

I first got into web design/development in the late 90s, and only as I type this sentence do I realize how long ago that was. And boy, it was horrendous. I mean, being able to make stuff and put it online where other people could see it was pretty slick,…

The other day I read 20 most significant programming languages in history, a “preposterous table I just made up.” He certainly got preposterous right: he lists Go as “most significant” but not ALGOL, Smalltalk, or ML. He also leaves off Pascal because it’s…

Performance clearly matters to users. For example, the most common software update on the AppStore is "Bug fixes and performance enhancements." Now that Moore's Law has ended, programmers have to work hard to get high performance for their applications. But…

You have a function that takes 3 parameters, but 2 of them are optional. If you call that function with 2 parameters, does that make that…

Dave Chinner
http://lca2015.linux.org.au/schedule/30034/view_talk
I recently came across a statement on LKML:

'
› Reviewed by:…

TL;DR: Firefox used to have a great extension mechanism based on the XUL and XPCOM. This mechanism served us well for a long time. However, it came at an ever-growing cost in terms of maintenance for both Firefox developers and add-on developers. On one side…

That is

The popular free software project “youtube-dl” was removed from Github on Friday following a legal notice from the Recording Industry Association of America claiming it violates copyright law. The tool is widely used by journalists for various reporting purposes.

My work brings me though a lot of software correctness techniques, things like type theory, test-driven development (TDD), and formal methods. The surrounding communities all have the same problem: they can’t get people using these techniques. They all ask…

This browser caching change kills the utility of cross-site resource CDNs like Google Fonts.