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Part of my work involves the mild reverse-engineering of binary file formats. I say “mild” because usually other people do all of the actual work; I just have to figure out what an extra flag field or two means, and I then take as much credit as possible for the discovery on my blog.
The problem with most programming languages is they’re designed by language geeks, who tend to worry about things that I don’t much care for. Safety, type systems, homoiconicity, and so forth. I’m sure these things are great, but when I’m messing around with a new project for fun, my two concerns are 1) making it work…
Nothing! Just kidding, you’ll see a lot of distressed messages from tasks that passed out wait for the phone to ring, and woke up wearing someone else’s OS thread. 1
Erlang is a twenty-five-year-old programming language that has yet to win a popularity contest, and almost certainly will never win any medals for speed, let alone any tiaras for syntactic beauty. The language is slow, awkward, and ugly. Refactoring Erlang code is a pain.
[ Update , Feb. 5, 2020: Perl 6 is now called Raku. I’ve updated the review title, but left the review body intact. ]
A review of Rust, the programming language built for safety – not necessarily for comfort.
C has a reputation for being inflexible. But did you know you can change the argument order of C functions if you don't like them?
In the movie Avatar , there’s this big badass bird-brained pterodactyl thing called a Toruk that the main character must learn to ride in order to regain the trust of the blue people. As a general rule, Toruks do not like to be ridden, but if you fight one, subdue it, and then link your Blue Man ponytail to the…