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2011
247

The plumber programmer

I called someone a plumber programmer the other day. The person I was speaking to didn't realize that "plumber programmer" is a term of great respect. The plumber is often the most experienced programmer on a team. As with literal plumbing, software plumbing connects things together. It deals with things other people…

253

How to read Haskell like Python

Have you ever been in the situation where you need to quickly understand what a piece of code in some unfamiliar language does? If the language looks a lot like what you’re comfortable with, you can usually guess what large amounts of the code does; even if you may not be completely familiar how all the language…

257

Portrait of a N00b

Well, the typing issue is a thorny one. I think as a general rule, the reddit types are too eager to denounce it immediately and tell us all that Ruby is the answer, or whatever it is this week, and the Java purists and academics make the opposite argument. Coming from someone from a dynamic background, I didn't use a…

260

Flash is dead. Long live the internet.

When I was in high school I didn’t own a computer. I used to read the occasional Popular Mechanics magazine and would linger for a while on the articles about the internet or HTML, fascinated by this new technology that I had barely even used. I don’t know why, but for some reason I’ve always been drawn toward…