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The Art of Unix Programming
My fourth book.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 14,544 posts.
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Free Programming Ebooks
Since this post got quite popular I decided to incorporate some of the excellent suggestions posted in the comments, so this list now has more than …
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Never create Ruby strings longer than 23 characters
Obviously this is an utterly preposterous statement: it’s hard to think of a more ridiculous and esoteric coding requirement. I can just imagine all sorts of amusing conversations with designers and business sponsors: “No... the size of this <input> field should be 23... 24 is just too long!” Or: “We need to explain…
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A Programming Idiom You've Never Heard Of
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
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Clojure 2011 Year in Review
A new year is upon us. Before the world ends, let’s take a look back at what 2011 meant for everybody’s favorite programming language:
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The best things and stuff of 2011 by Fogus
Great things and people that I discovered, learned, read, met, etc. in 2011. No particular ordering is implied. Not everything is new.
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nasal demons
Recognized shorthand on the Usenet group comp.std.c for any unexpected behavior of a C compiler on encountering an undefined construct. During a discussion on that group in early 1992, a regular remarked “ When the compiler encounters [a given undefined construct] it is legal for it to make demons fly out of your nose…
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Why do C++ folks make things so complicated?
This morning Miroslav Bajtoš asked "Why do C++ folks make things so complicated?" in response to my article on regular expressions in C++. Other people asked similar questions yesterday. My response has two parts: Why I believe C++ libraries are often complicated. Why I don't think it has to be that way. Why would…
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Hitchhiker's Guide to Python
I first heard about The Hitchhiker's Guide to Python at PyCodeConf a few months ago. It's a fantastic idea: open source, community-driven documentation on how to do Python right: everything from how to learn Python, to how to write idiomatic code, to how to distribute your projects, to surveys of best-of-breed open…
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Darts, Dice, and Coins: A beautiful article on a beautiful algorithm
Earlier this year, I asked a question on Stack Overflow about a data structure for loaded dice . Specifically, I was interested in answering this question:
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Practical Garbage Collection - Part 1: Introduction
Introduction This is the first part of a series of blog posts I intend to write, whose aim will be to explain how garbage collection works in the real world (in particular, with the JVM). I will co…
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A Perl Regular Expression That Matches Prime Numbers
Take a look at this Perl regular expression: perl -lne '(1x$_) =~ /^(11+?)\1+$/ && print "$_ is composite"' This regular expression matches only the composite numbers (and doesn't match prime numbers). Can you figure out how it works? I'll give the explanation below but try to figure it…
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"Another World" (game) Code Review
I spent two weeks reading and reverse engineering further the source code of Another World ("Out Of This World" in North America). I based my work on Gregory Montoir's "binary to C++" initial reverse engineering from the DOS executable. I was amazed to discover an elegant system based on a virtual machine interpreting…
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John Resig: JavaScript as a First Language
At Khan Academy we’ve been investigating teaching Computer Science to students in some new and interesting ways. The most interesting aspect of which is that we’re likely going to be teaching them JavaScript as their first language.
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All Programmers Are Self-Taught
When I was a teenager I played high caliber baseball. I’m competitive to a fault and when I decide I want to be good at something, results usually follow. Now I’m a third year undergrad…
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The switch: Python to Node.js
In my previous post , I glossed over our team switching from Python to Node.js. I kept it brief because the switch wasn’t the focus of the post, but since I believe I am being misunderstood, I will explain it in depth:
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