Laugh and sigh, kiss and goodbye, that’s our whole life.
Jerome Klapka Jerome
Laziness. Impatience. Hubris.
Larry Wall
Laziness – The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful, and document what you wrote so you don’t have to answer so many questions about it. Hence, the first great virtue of a programmer.
Impatience – The anger you feel when the computer is being lazy. This makes you write programs that don’t just react to your needs, but actually anticipate them. Or at least that pretend to. Hence, the second great virtue of a programmer.
Hubris – Excessive pride, the sort of thing Zeus zaps you for. Also the quality that makes you write (and maintain) programs that other people won’t want to say bad things about. Hence, the third great virtue of a programmer.
By Larry Wall.
In business, you don’t get what you deserve, you get what you negotiate.
Chester L. Karrass
On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament]: “Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?” I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (1864)
Your life is your design, so go ahead design it.
Genevieve – Show Your Colors
Your star is in the sky, so go ahead align it.
Cause your forever lost, until you go and find it.
(Go, Go!) Go find it!
We are the domestic pets of a human zoo we call civilization.
Lawrence Gonzales – Deep Survival
Let’s Stop Copying C
Alas, the popularity of C has led to a number of programming languages’ taking significant cues from its design, and parts of its design are… slightly questionable. I’ve gone through some common features that probably should’ve stayed in C and my justification for saying so. The features are listed in rough order from (I hope) least to most controversial. The idea is that C fans will give up when I call it “weakly typed” and not even get to the part where I rag on braces. Wait, crap, I gave it away.
https://eev.ee/blog/2016/12/01/lets-stop-copying-c/#optional-block-delimiters
PHP 1000
I’ve been working in PHP this year and it’s very refreshing. It did take me 4 tries to expunge all the .net baggage I’ve accumulated over the past 10+ years of “enterprise” software development. I’ve got my app down to about 1000 lines of code, plus another 1000 or so lines of utility functions.
Written 2013-02-24.
Dev Life
I really respect the guy I am working for, starting in 2013. He gets calls from people who want him to build web apps for them. That’s pretty much my definition of heaven, right there.
Written 2013-02-24.
Cloud Dev
The future of developing-while-mobile is software like CodeMirror running on thin hardware and OS like the Google Chromebook, not running a thick OS like Ubuntu on such a machine. The cloud is not the target platform, the cloud is the platform, period.
Written 2013-03-04.
John DeHope 