Alonline » programming

The history of C

Al — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 00:15:23 +0000

I like C as a programming language: it’s neat, simple and works surprisingly well. It compiles into efficient code, since people have been perfecting C compilers for the last 30 years, and has grown into C++ which just makes things better again. All in all, a good language to know and use.

This is an interesting article about how C was born and how it was developed into the primary language of Unix. Dennis Ritchie tells the story first-hand, and tells is succinctly. I rate his writing as Kernighan and Ritchie’s original book – The C Programming Language – is still one of the best ways of learning C, and a good reference as well. If you’ve ever seen or used C, or want to know how a programming language comes into being, then have a read of this article.

Linux – evolving rather than being developed

Al — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 01:16:23 +0000

This is a fantastic response from Linus Torvalds to someone who was belittling the way Linux was, and still is, developed. Linus’s answer is accurate, articulate, and manages to explain exactly how, and why, Linux development works with one very apt analogy:

On Fri, 30 Nov 2001, Rik van Riel wrote:
> I’m very interested too, though I’ll have to agree with Larry
> that Linux really isn’t going anywhere in particular and seems
> to be making progress through sheer luck.

Hey, that’s not a bug, that’s a FEATURE!
You know what the most complex piece of engineering known to man in the whole solar system is?
Guess what – it’s not Linux, it’s not Solaris, and it’s not your car.
It’s you. And me.
And think about how you and me actually came about – not through any complex design.
Right. “sheer luck”.
Well, sheer luck, AND:
- free availability and _crosspollination_ through sharing of “source code”, although biologists call it DNA.
- a rather unforgiving user environment, that happily replaces bad versions of us with better working versions and thus culls the herd (biologists often call this “survival of the fittest”)
- massive undirected parallel development (“trial and error”)
I’m deadly serious: we humans have _never_ been able to replicate something more complicated than what we ourselves are, yet natural selection did it without even thinking.
Don’t underestimate the power of survival of the fittest.
And don’t EVER make the mistake that you can design something better than what you get from ruthless massively parallel trial-and-error with a feedback cycle. That’s giving your intelligence _much_ too much credit.
Quite frankly, Sun is doomed. And it has nothing to do with their
engineering practices or their coding style.
Linus

RFC822: Email address verification using RegExp

Al — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 01:27:51 +0000

Regular expressions are very clever, cool (in an uber-geeky way) and amazingly powerful. They are also almost incomprehensible to al but the ultimate Perl geeks, and can be pretty scary, literally. This regexp, for example, has a certain beauty in it’s immensity, and is scary as you know what it does (validate whether an email address is, in fact, valid), but you haven’t got a clue as to how it goes about doing that. I suppose if you spent time breaking it down into it’s component parts, and analysed each in turn, then you might be able to work out what is going on, but I had a feeling this was written in a higher level language, and then translated into a regexp for speed and efficiency. However it was made, behold RFC822 in all it’s glory, and tremble before it’s inscrutability.

LOLCODE – lolcats attack programming

Al — Sat, 09 Jun 2007 15:40:58 +0000

This made me laugh out loud when I first read it. I was a bit dubious at first, but reading the sample code made me realise this could actually work, and could be amusing (in small doses anyway). How can anyone with a smattering of coding knowledge not enjoy:

HAI
I HAS A CHEEZBURGER ITZ 1

IM IN YR LOOP
  VISIBLE "I has dis many: " N CHEEZBURGER
  IZ CHEEZBURGER BIGGER THAN 11 O RLY?
    YA RLY
      GTFO
    NO WAI
      UP CHEEZBURGER!!1
  KTHX
KTHX

KTHXBYE

There are some active interpreters for LOLCODE already, and I think this could run for a while. Read more here, including comments from people with no sense of humour.

MS Photosynth is available to play with

Al — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 00:12:29 +0000

I blogged Photosynth a while back, and I never expected it to make any form of public showing this year. In fact I expected it to be developed fully and released as a stand alone program for a a reasonable sum of money, not made publicly available on the Internet for anyone to try and have a play with. Although you can only use Microsoft’s own collections of photographs at the moment, they have announced that you will be able to use your own collections when the program is working successfully. This may take some time, but expect to start seeing people taking an unusually large amount of photographs when they are in any major place of interest.

How to write perfect software

Al — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 20:51:27 +0000

Ok – this article is 10 years old, but I’m certain that my company could benefit from reading and reviewing the ideas it contains. In particular the bit about careful planning, ironing out all the ideas and requirements, before writing any code would have saved them a lot of time and expense. The processes described in this article could not be applied to all real-world situations, because market and products change at such a fast rate these days. However, if you are not willing to follow these processes and principles then you have to budget and allow for errors, and this is very hard as errors are unpredictable, by their very nature. I trained in Systems Analysis a long time a go and I can see the benefit of breaking problems down into outline, detail, pseudo-code and then real code, but I can also feel the urgency that stirs when the creative juices get going. The discipline these guys have shown is not for everyone, however if you want fault free code you may have to enforce it.

The Enigma machine in Flash

Al — Sun, 10 Sep 2006 22:56:28 +0000

We all know how far the world has advanced in the last 100 years, but sometimes you get a simple reminder like this. During the Second World War the Germans had a huge advantage over the Allies – their Enigma code machine. In the UK 100′s of top mathematicians and logicians worked day and night to try to crack this code. If they could only have had a working model of the Enigma machine then they would have had a far easier time of it. Well now here’s a fully working Enigma machine, with all the workings displayed, operating entirely in Flash.

Aptana – Dynamic web IDE

Al — Sun, 13 Aug 2006 02:02:34 +0000

Aptana looks rather good. It offers a neat IDE for dynaimc web pages using Javascript, HTML and CSS. I’m hoping it offers PHP as well as I’m about to start work on my next web project and that will use a lot of PHP. I’m just downloading Aptana now and I’ll give you my opinion in a couple of days time.

Blogged with Flock

This guy talks sense

Al — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 23:18:00 +0000

Ths Joel Test appears to be a sensible way of looking at how a software development team would work. Even looking at this from the perspective of an amateur programmer I can see that some aspects apply to and indivual as well as a company. I’ll be browsing through the rest of this site when I get some time.

Blogged with Flock

OpenLaszlo – ultimate web 2.0 goodness

Al — Sun, 14 May 2006 22:09:30 +0000

Where has this been hiding? And how come it took me so long to find it? OpenLaszlo appears to be exactly what every web designer needs – the ability to create high quality, high-end web based applications with a simple scripting kit. And the demonstrations are very, very cool too. All I need now is to break my leg, or something similar, to give me the time off work to learn and use this little beauty.