Programming is Life

Umwelt as Applied to Knowledge

A few months after I got my doctorate, I decided to find a job in the industry, even though I was a postdoc at the time. I was making some money, but the prospects of being a professor were not great, as I was born at the tail end of the baby boom. This means every…

BCPL! How the C language Got Its Name, Maybe

The story about why the C language is called C is quite well known. Its…

Do we Need Intelligence to be Intelligent?

That is weird. Let me rephrase it. Do we need to be intelligent to be intelligent? Now that is a question about a tautology. Obviously. No?

Well, it seems to me that some people actually think that AI does not need to be…

How to get Hired as a Programmer Easily

Until about 18 years ago, I worked as a normal programmer: I basically worked for others. So, I had to find work. Going to interview, put up with the corporate nonsense, etc. I have been free of them for 18 years now, working for myself for that long. But that…

What Languages Do I Use?

I have a simple way to decide whether I will use Ruby, Perl, Java, or Bash. If I need to maintain it 10 years from now. It is in Java. If it is going to be fewer than 10 lines and I only need to use the command line arguments, it is Bash. If I need to process a few things, but not too…

There are Innovations in Academia

I read an article about why innovations in academia is rare. Is it though?

For computer related technology and computer science itself, that is not entirely true. Arpanet was a military and academic collaboration. Knuth did quite a bit of…

Do What You Like

When I was studying computer science in university, in the early 1980’s, the future for a programmer was to do COBOL in a big company, most probably a bank or an insurance company, using IBM mainframes. Jobs that used minicomputers like DEC VAX, etc., were few and far between. Those were the dream…

Can We have Beautiful Code?

I don’t know. That is the short answer. I have been thinking about this for a long time. Christopher Alexander got me thinking about this question ever since I read his “The Timeless Way of Building”. There is a certain beauty in things done the natural way. We instinctively know…

Why I Like Justifiable Verbosity in Programming Languages

I started using Perl in 1988 or 1989, I think. Yes, right at the time Larry Wall released his Perl. I was doing a lot of scripting at that time, and the Bourne shell (sh) was giving me fits. Why not write csh scripts? Well, okay…