They say you should learn a new programming language every year. I don’t necessarily agree, but it’s happening this year for me with R. Here are the steps I have found over the years to make it go smoothly. If you’re a perl, C++, or Java zealot, it’s been nice knowing you…
Continue reading about How to Choose and Learn a New Programming Language
If I’m going to have a productive day, it usually means spending it in a shell. I use GNOME Terminal as my xterm clone of choice, simply because it’s a default. If you don’t know what terminal you’re using, it’s probably gnome-terminal if you’re running GNOME. I recently started making some productivity tweaks to my [...]
Ha-choo! If you’re not already using Google Reader, go get it, load your OPML, and try this: ‘?’. Excuse me; sorry for sneezing all over you. After spending a few years in the blogosphere using unsatisfying readers, I made the move to Google Reader a couple months ago. It just had so much to offer. [...]
This is a constraint-based exercise to force myself to do something quickly and imperfectly. I have a hard time discerning the right point at which to stop tuning things. It took me three years of searching for the perfect blogging tool before I finally bit the bullet and just forced myself to go with an [...]
These are the languages that I consider interesting* today. I’ve included their approximate year of first release. Also, a look at the importance of support for concurrency. As you can see, these fit into a surprisingly small time window, which I’ll call the Golden Age.** I wanted to make it a round decade, but had [...]
Continue reading about 1983-96: The Golden Age of Programming Languages
Like many other hackers who sit in wonky chairs for 12+ hours every day, I have a bit of a “back problem”. And of course I’m an optimizer, AKA cheapskate (which surely contributes to the problem). Even so, I still end up dropping 50 bucks each month on chiropractic visits. How can I optimize that?! [...]