Programming games

That is, games that involve programming (including Stockfighter) - cool post.

UFla Sparse Matrix Collection

A nifty set of real-world sparse matrices, with links to programming challenges and algorithms. Not to mention pretty pictures.

Back to basics - strings

Joel on Software on strings and algorithmic complexity.

Code challenges

A nice article recommending the solution of code challenges against an autojudge to improve programming skill.

Class hierarchies considered harmful

Good article from Raganwald.

Software construction isn't construction - it's writing

This guy gets it - programming is language. Conceptually we are describing things when we write software. Not building things.  (Not that, deep down, those are that different.)

Signs you're a good programmer

... and how to cultivate the art.

Refactoring in Discourse

Neat article on refactoring.

HTML5 Tetris

One more koan.

Programming is terrible

Interesting and funny blog on programming topics.

Fast game-writing competition

Oh, look - another programming competition, this one a series of games! And a specific post listing favored components.

Coding quality

A couple of interesting posts about coding itself that I ran across:

• Coding Horror: All Abstractions are Failed Abstractions
  The example being LINQ abstracting away the SQL, and sometimes making bad decisions in doing so.  I think in this case, my response is that an abstraction is useful as far as it goes, but a better programming system would allow you to capture all the useful levels of abstraction when and if needed.
• Joel on Software: Making Wrong Code Look Wrong
  The original purpose of Hungarian notation.  I am blown away, having learned Hungarian notation in the second wave where it had become useless.
  But the point here is (to me) packing semantics into your syntactic code.  Wouldn't it be better to address the semantics from the start?
• Programming like a Pirate
  A nice point made about overdoing the extraction technique - the point is for your code to explain what it does, not to have fifteen levels of abstraction everywhere.

Random walk through coding country

Man, there is a lot of stuff out on the wild Internet these days.  Here's a brief trajectory of interesting things.

• Parsing Markdown as an F# kata
• F# snippets have a site of their own
• An F# Reversi kata (returns valid next moves)
• Coding dojo kata list.
• GNU C tutorial: getline.

Tools for coders and developers

Another one of those list articles.  I like them.

How to use SSH for fun and profit

I've never been good at SSH.  Here's a great blog post about using it.

Also: ssh-copy-id.

Combining functional and imperative programming

Here's a nice post about a study!  Turns out functional programming isn't actually easier to use - in fact, this study showed that Scala's rigid type system made debugging harder.  The theory, of course, is that rigid typing should make debugging less necessary because many logical errors won't even compile.

The Scala programs were also smaller, but not by a whole lot.

The title, though, is misleading.  If I understand correctly, this isn't combining approaches so much as comparing them.  Decl should combine them.  Is there an Inline::Haskell?  (Answer: no. But there are some sorta-kinda things that look real Haskelly.)

Greg Wilson on software engineering

I actually ran across this in August (yes, I have a six-week backlog on bookmarked things to post about - mostly I put them back into the stream in the same week I encountered them, but this one is really good and I want to think about it a little more than just posting a "this exists" post.)

Greg Wilson has been bopping around the software world for a long time now, and is concerned about the science of computer programming.  As in: there isn't one.  He has a fantastic slideshow here, which you can scan through in about three minutes, and it all leads up to his book "The Architecture of Open-Source Applications".

I've just grazed the surface with it, but before I spout off some thoughts, let me inject a couple more links:  http://www.neverworkintheory.org/ is a blog about software development research that is relevant in practice (says so on the header), http://software-carpentry.org/ is an organization teaching researchers how to code better, and Wilson's own blog at http://third-bit.com/ - those are the links at the end of the slideshow.

OK. So.  Architecture of open-source applications, yeah.  This is essentially a list of high-level descriptions of the shape of the code for 49 different serious open-source applications and a little rumination on choices made.  This is higher-level than Decl core is looking, but clearly a separate semantics of application architecture would be really nice to have.  To that end, I need to read this book, cover to cover.

What I'd like to do is then look at some of these applications at the code level, and build a "semantic framework" describing the code.  I'm not even sure what that means yet.  But I want to evolve towards code understanding code (for certain values of "understanding").

Thoughts about being a good programmer

Nice article, suitable for contemplation.

Learnable programming

An absolutely fascinating system for linking code to graphical results to facilitate understanding of the algorithm.  Wow.

Simple Linuces

So something people do to gain their hacker chops is build a Linux core from nothing.  This might be fun sometime, so I gathered a few links.

• Linux from scratch
• HNN post on same
• Gentoo