Very thought-provoking response to that 'Light Table' demo which went round the aggregators a couple of weeks back. 'The fundamental reason IDEs have dead-ended is that they are constrained by the syntax and semantics of our programming languages. Our programming languages were all designed to be used with a text editor. It is therefore not surprising that our IDEs amount to tarted-up text editors. Likewise our programming languages were all designed with an imperative semantics that efficiently matches the hardware but defies static visualization. Indeed it would be a miracle if we could slap a new IDE on top of an old language and magically alter its syntactic and semantic assumptions. I don’t believe in miracles. Languages and IDEs have co-evolved and neither can change without the other also changing. That is why three years ago I put aside my IDE work to focus on language design. Getting rid of imperative semantics is one of the goals. Another is getting rid of source text files (as well as ASTs, which carry all the baggage of a textual encoding minus the readability). This has turned out to be really really hard. And lonely – no one wants to even talk about these crazy ideas. Nevertheless I firmly believe that so long as we are programming in decendants of assembly language we will continue to program in descendants of text editors.' (via Chris Horn)

via Niamh -- 'I learned a bit about teaching at primary level and I learned that it is pretty fun although REALLY hard work! I learned that if you make a complex subject engaging kids will learn it and are probably capable of a great deal more than they are often given credit for. The youngest kids on the day were year four which is aged 8-9 and although they were definitely more able than some of their peers, you can expect that by year 5-6 (aged 9-11) probably a lot of the kids could follow it and indeed learn to code.'

Detect near-duplicates; would be good for future Razor-like efficient near-duplicate detection. (slides)

'A tense silence falls between us. The phone call goes unmade. I'll call tomorrow once my comrade regains his senses and is willing to commit to something reasonable.'

'it's both incredible and poignant that a voluntary movement that was born in Ireland during the summer is about to go international. Coder Dojo, the brainchild of 19-year-old entrepreneur and programmer James Whelton from Cork and tech entrepreneur Bill Liao, began as a Saturday morning club for kids to teach each other software programming. It has grown into a national movement up and down Ireland, a place where kids and their parents can go and learn to write software code in a friendly environment. The first UK Coder Dojo was held in London only last week and other countries in Europe are clamouring to get the initiative started there, too.' Good on them!

ouch

'Eclim is less of an application and more of an integration of two great projects. The first, Vim, is arguably one of the best text editors in existence. The second, Eclipse, provides many great tools for development in various languages. Each provides many features that can increase developer productivity, but both still leave something to be desired. Vim lacks native Java support and many of the advanced features available in Eclipse. Eclipse, on the other hand, still requires the use of the mouse for many things, and when compared to Vim, provides a less than ideal interface for editing text. That is where eclim comes into play. Instead of trying to write an IDE in Vim or a Vim editor in Eclipse, eclim provides an Eclipse plug-in that exposes Eclipse features through a server interface, and a set of Vim plug-ins that communicate with Eclipse over that interface. This functionality can be leveraged in three primary ways, as illustrated below.'

I think I prefer the structural-typing approach, TBH

a good intro from Bruce Eckel. We need a good excuse to deploy some Scala ;)

will have to run this by our resident Pythonistas in work as a good set of guidelines

ie. TinEye and other "images like this one" search engines. nice explanation

Vim gets a good IDE feature. 'highlights common Python errors like misspelling a variable name on the fly. It also warns about unused imports, redefined functions, etc.'

'an application packaging format, a server configuration library, a cloud server management tool, a persistence management tool, and a tool to manage the application with respect to all these services over time.'  interesting, possibly too Pythonic

lots of patterns to write safe node.js code.  Pretty daunting, to be honest

huh. Test-driven development is slower than traditional write-first-test-at-the-end development, but it results in less bugs. Grokcode theorise that its big win is amortising the cost of testing throughout the product iteration, hence reducing the temptation to skip testing when the crunch phase happens

a great name for a common "code smell" of too much indentation, calling for merciless usage of Extract Method (via Aman)

algorithm to perform set membership tests on enumerated sets quickly and memory-efficiently, using multiplication by primes. Nice trick

some gems here

good opinion piece; I agree, REPL isn't a usable approach for block-oriented languages

neat search algo, via Jeremy Zawodny; can be more efficient than binary search (O(log log n)), for indexed, ordered arrays, at the cost of more computation per iteration

'Programming is an embarrassment compared to other fields of engineering and design. Our mainstream culture is one of adolescent self-indulgence. It is like something from Gulliver’s Travels, with the curly-bracketeers vs. the indentationites vs. the parenthesesophiles. The only thing that everyone seems to agree upon is how stupid all the other programmers are. Try googling “stupid programmers”. We have met the enemy, and he is us.' Fantastic post via Jan Lenhardt

'the process of taking a well-designed piece of code and, through a series of small, reversible changes, making it completely unmaintainable by anyone except yourself' (via Mozai)

good reviews and notes from Peteris Krumins

great article on the 80's one-man shareware game hobbyists (via Walter)

'an online compiler/interpreter, and a simple collaboration tool. It's a pastebin that executes code for you. You paste your code, and codepad runs it and gives you a short URL you can use to share it.' supports C, C++, D, Haskell, Lua, OCaml, PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, Scheme, and Tcl code; isolated by a geordi-based supervisor, in turn running inside a firewalled virt, in turn running inside a firewalled dom0. nice work!

lovely run-through of the computer-vision algorithms this iPhone app uses (via Waxy)

actually quite a good breakdown of software eng skill progression