Here’s the abstract from a paper about pragmatic programming via scripting languages:
The author recommends that scripting, not Java, be taught first, asserting that students should learn to love their own possibilities before they learn to loathe other people’s restrictions.
This is good advice about teaching people how to live, period.
(via Lambda the Ultimate)
I’m incredibly happy to report that my story, How I Got Here, has just been published in the latest issue of Weird Tales.
I wrote it at Clarion, in the bowels of UCSD’s wonderfully strange Geisel Library, in three days. Usually it takes me weeks to pound these guys out, so this one was a gift. [...]
Fate is a rollercoaster of improbabilities that twists through vistas of the unlikely and the mundane and the absurd before depositing you in the middle of an American Idol concert.
Or maybe that’s just me.
Anyway, that’s where I found myself this weekend, in a narrow plastic seat in front of a row of pre-teen girls, all [...]
Looked at in a certain way, writing programs is mostly an epic battle against complexity. It doesn’t take long for any reasonably ambitious project to get too big to fit in any one person’s head, and, once it’s reached that stage, it never gets any better. Because complexity is a tide that never goes out. [...]
Epicurus:
Nothing to fear in God. Nothing to feel in death. Good can be attained. Evil can be endured.
There are basically two ways to react to the news that something you vociferously advocated for turned out to be a really, really bad idea: you can either admit your mistake and learn from it, or you can double down. Here’s Tom Friedman doubling down:
It’s been a while since I’ve heard someone so intelligent say [...]
Bruce Springsteen, in an interview with 60 minutes:
As an artist, your job is to make your audience care about your obsessions.
Twenty years later, and the dude’s still blowing my mind.
I just found out from my friend Z that his company’s content filters have started banning this blog. I wonder what I did to piss off the cyberprudes — to much cursing? Whining? Bush bashing? Goose slandering?
Whatever it is, it needs to stop. Pariahood is bad for my complexion. So, from now on, I’m going [...]
Anybody who has a nostalgic interest in vintage technology (especially games) should head over to my friend C. Nimbus’s blog, Teleblivion. Some fantastic posts there recently.
Gruber nails it:
I posit that the usability and elegance of any product, software or hardware, tends to reach and seldom surpasses the level that satisfies the taste of whoever is in charge of the product. The people in charge of most free and open source software products tend to have poor taste in [...]
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