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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 14,544 posts.
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Desperate Perl Hacker
I owe a whole lot to Perl. So does the practice of computing in general, and the construction of the Web in particular. Perl’s situation is not terribly happy; I wouldn’t go so far as to say “desperate”, but certainly these are not its glory days.
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Dammit, MySQL
Update May 2018: This is more rant-ish than I would write now, but it’s my only post to hit the front page of HackerNews (it got to the number 2 spot back in 2010; I saved screenshots), so has a soft-place in my heart.
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Me vs Backspace: my war against a rogue character
A while ago, I began receiving reports from various people in IRC that I was prepending a garbage ascii character to some of my messages. I found this very odd. The complaints didn’t stop. It became a running joke. Eventually, playful mockery. It is a bit demeaning to hang out in programmer corners and not have any…
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Abandoned open source projects
About some problems I'm having with old open source projects and a Github feature request to try and fix them.
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Veracity: The next step in DVCS
One week from today, at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention , SourceGear will be making a big announcement. Today I'm giving you an early preview. We've been building something new. :-)
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In defence of SQL
SQL is ugly but powerful, ORM is genuinely dumb, and "NoSQL" should really be called OMADS: Obviously More Appropriate Data Stores. Start every project with an RDBMS, add specialized stores where they fit, and stop apologizing for using SQL. Forty years on, nothing beats it for ad-hoc questions about your data.
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Urbit: functional programming from scratch
Urbit is a static functional namespace : a programming environment specified as a single stateless, frozen function. The Urbit function is ...
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Data URIs make CSS sprites obsolete
The Official Web Site of Nicholas C. Zakas
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How to Deconstruct Almost Anything, by a Software Engineer
This is the story of one computer professional's explorations in the world of postmodern literary criticism. I'm a working software engineer, not a student nor an academic nor a person with any real background in the humanities. Consequently, I've approached the whole subject with a somewhat different frame of mind…
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Tim Bray doesn't know operator precedence rules
I was watching engineers argue, someone was bitching about a code reviewer asking him to put more parentheses in a conditional: “As if I don’t know the precedence rules!” I don’t know them, as a matter of principle.
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Stack Overflow Fatigue
This post has moved to Robert Elwell's Blog -- Stack Overflow Fatigue?
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Knuth's 'Earthshaking Announcement' due tomorrow
(I'm still looking for the catchiest way to appreciate the number MMXXVI. Exercise 7.2.1.6–122 gives 1234+.5*6+789 and -1+2345*6/7+8+9 and 1+(2/3)*45*67.8-9 ; other suggestions are welcome. The most elegant that I've seen so far is a beauty that was suggested independently by Arnaud Lefebvre and by Evangelos…
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IE’s big leap forward; CSS3 selectors fully supported
In the past few days I’ve been revising the CSS compatibility table with information about the latest crop of browsers. There’s no doubt about it: this is IE9’s show. It just supports nearly everything. No hassle, no buts.