December 2011
6 posts
Best of 2011
Traffic grew 7X in 2011, compared to 2010. Here’s a round up of the most popular posts of 2011.
Thanks for reading!
Size is the best predictor of code quality
The Cognitive Style of Unix
GUI vs. CLI: Operation vs. Expression
Smeed’s Law for Programming
Stallman’s dystopia
Minimalism is not a viable intellectual strategy
Editing Google Docs in Emacs
OOP = FP?
Also: ...
How to make your new programming language...
Say you have cooked up a brand-new programming language. Now what can you do to dislodge the incumbents and have your language take over the world?
Be incremental. Your new programming language must be understandable in terms of concepts that most programmers already understand. If you are going into new territory, you must justify it with shortcomings in the incumbents.
C, which was probably...
““Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse....”
– The Velveteen Rabbit.
The 0.1x developer
One of the strongest myths in software is that of the 10x developer. The one who is 10 times more productive than the average developer. It keeps coming up again and again. I most recently saw a reference to it in Venkat’s Developeronomics piece1.
It is a fallacy. Not in the sense that certain developers aren’t 10 times as productive as the average, but in the way they achieve that...
The monk tax
The idea of going to college seems to be falling out of favor. It’s expensive, and not all that useful, and saddles most graduates with debt, the naysayers argue. All this, in spite of incontrovertible data that education still pays1. But I want to draw our attention not to college, not to how they are administered, not to those who pass through them, but to that which contains all of...