I mean, I’m a computer guy. I’ve seen trends rise and fall before I even bothered to really sink into them (because I was busy doing other stuff). In a way I feel like I"m losing touch with techn…

A name’s length should not exceed its information content. For a local variable, the name i conveys as much information as index or idx and is quicker to read. Similarly, i and j are a better pair of…

Turns out through the S3 API you can actually spin up EC2 instances, and my key had been spotted by a bot that continually searches GitHub for API keys. Amazon AWS customer support informed me this ha…

But to anyone who has ever wondered whether using m4 macros to configure autoconf to write a shell script to look for 26 Fortran compilers in order to build a Web browser was a bit of a detour, Brooks…

Today’s Unix/Posix-like operating systems, even including IBM’s z/OS mainframe version, as seen with 1980 eyes are identical; yet the 31,085 lines of configure for libtool still check if <sys/stat.…

This is commonly believed, but in fact, a type checker introduces bugs.  It shifts the cost of a certain class of mistakes so much that the kinds of mistakes people make in the presence of a type chec…

the number of software packages that help people read mail and news and waste enormous amount of time in front of the computer are legion, but they tend to make people spend /more/ time on these tasks…

As for the argument that unit testing can replace strong typing, consider the common refactoring practice in strongly typed languages: changing the type of an argument of a particular function http:/…

Franz Kafka’s character, Gregor Samsa, breaks the type system when he metamorphoses into a giant bug, and we all know how it ends. http://bartoszmilewski.com/2014/11/24/types-and-functions/…

This is honestly the kind of crappy advice that has me paying little to no attention to the Haskell community any longer. A noisy subsdt of silly people has collectively gone nuts for abstractions tha…

hellrealreal http://xach.com/naggum/articles/[email protected]…

correctlyquickly http://xach.com/naggum/articles/[email protected]…