"In my opinion the Go designers have done an excellent job of blending the flexibility and convenience of a scripting language with the performance and safety of a strongly typed compiled language. Coupled with its special support for concurrency and excellent standard library this makes Go a great language to work with. The amazing speed of the compiler"means the development cycle is a fast as a scripting language even though full optimizations are always switched on.

Given that integers are read from a data stream. Find median of elements read so for in efficient way.

The simple programming language demonstrated in this article is the untyped lambda calculus, and the implementations of datatypes are Church encodings. The lambda calculus is powerful because it’s Turing complete.

"On a side note, I think continual simplification is vital to maintaining a healthy, long-lived codebase."

"To the extent the data is immutable, there is little harm that can come of providing access, other than that someone could come to depend upon something that might change. Well, okay, people do that all the time in real life, and when things change, they adapt. And if they are rational, they know when they make a decision based upon something that can change that they might in the future need to adapt. So, it’s a risk management decision, one I think programmers should be free to make."

--Rich Hickey seems to possess that rare and fantastic combination of being very intelligent but still extremely pragmatic while still shipping high quality code.

"It is not about solving puzzles and being the brightest kid in the class. It is about realizing that the complexity of software dwarfs even the most brilliant human; that cleverness cannot win. The only weapons we have are simplicity and convention. Tattoo that on your forehead in reverse so that you always see it reflected in the screen. What is truly decisive on the battlefield are attitudes: hard work, responsibility, and paying attention to reality instead of the voiceover in your head."

This is one of the best guides that get you from writing C to writing C well.

"There is more value in learning to work in and around piles of crappy code than learning to make beautiful code; all code turns into shit given enough time and hands." -There are some real gems in this and most of them seem true enough to me.

Old-school game programming tutorials.

"This article presents two strategies as two different ways to implement a virtual machine that executes a regular expression that has been compiled into text-matching bytecodes, just like .NET and Mono are different ways to implement a virtual machine that executes a program that has been compiled into CLI bytecodes."

Erlang's programming rules that are good in the whole

Great article about the benefits of functional programming, and Haskell in particular.

MikeOS Main MenuMikeOS is an operating system for x86 PCs, written in assembly language. It is a learning tool to show how simple OSes work, with well-commented code and extensive documentation.

There will always be things we wish to say in our programs that in all known languages can only be said poorly.

-- Alan Perlis

Lots of good tidbits in this one.

CC-licensed version of 'Pro Git'.

Dependency locator for any language.

This system seems promising.

List of most of the refactoring methods in Fowler's book.

Great article -- "It's tempting to blame the business leaders ("MBA-types") for this mess. And in a mess this big, there is certainly blame to go around. But they are pushing for the things that matter to customers - features. And they are cognizant that their funding is limited, and if they don't find out which features are absolutely critical for their customers soon, they won't be able to survive. So they are legitimately suspicious when, instead of working on adding monetization to their product, some engineer wants to take a few weeks off to go polish code that is supposed to be already done."

"I didn't mean by this that Java programmers are dumb. I meant that Python programmers are smart. It's a lot of work to learn a new programming language. And people don't learn Python because it will get them a job; they learn it because they genuinely like to program and aren't satisfied with the languages they already know."

Since HubSpot's products are relevant in what I do in my 9-5, this is a interesting peak into their dev team's thoughts. It seems they use Java, MySQL, Hadoop (jealous), and test-driven development (VERY jealous).

Using pip and virtualenv to build reproducible and isolated Python environments.

Writing a Scheme interpreter in 15 minutes.

This description makes a lot of sense.

First comment:
# Use source control systems. (yes, even if you are alone)
# Document your code and your design.
# Use unit testing.
# Consider a side project in your free time, pick anything you like, experiment with it, for fun, try silly things and different approaches. When programming is a hobby it is easier to learn.

Very nice article on javascript scoping and closures.

"The thing that Josuttis got completely wrong, in my mildly arrogant opinion, is the notion that low quality code is cheaper than high quality code. Low quality code is not cheaper; it is vastly more expensive, even in the short term. Bad code slows everyone down from the minute that it is written. It creates a continuous and copious drag on further progress. It requires armies of coders to overcome that drag; and those armies must grow exponentially to maintain constant velocity against that drag."

Closures, with examples.

In this metaphor, doing things the quick and dirty way sets us up with a technical debt, which is similar to a financial debt. Like a financial debt, the technical debt incurs interest payments, which come in the form of the extra effort that we have to do in future development because of the quick and dirty design choice. We can choose to continue paying the interest, or we can pay down the principal by refactoring the quick and dirty design into the better design. Although it costs to pay down the principal, we gain by reduced interest payments in the future.

Whoosh: a fast pure-Python search engine

Fantastic post about the prevention of bugs.

Real world overview of how someone uses git.

List of lots of arithmetic arithmetic operations at the bit level.

Nice little run-down of distributed systems.

Brings up several points on the advantages of Python and its frameworks over Ruby on Rails.

An interesting primer on Ruby that makes extensive use of cartoon foxes.

James Bennett provides a nice in depth view on how to create a form using manipulators and validators.