I do a lot of interviews. I mean, seriously, a lot of interviews. One a day is getting to be pretty normal. I’ve read before Jeff Atwood’s classic “The Non-Programming Programmer,” and it’s still disturbingly valid, half a decade later: A very large percentage of the phone screens and in-person interviews I do are dismal, epic failures: The person can’t code, and, more significantly, doesn’t realize how poor their coding skills are. Our dev shop is populated by really capable people. We get stuff done. Our flagship product has two and a half million lines of code in it — and…
Read more →
MayJuneJuly
The latest: We’re expecting! The due date is the middle of February. First ultrasound looks good. Robin’s pretty sick a lot of the time, but there’s only a month left in the first trimester, and we’re hoping the nausea settles down after the first trimester like it did with Alan. She’s a lot sicker this time, and thinks that maybe that means we have a girl. Hard to say, but we’ll find out! Alan keeps growing. He’s at the just-shy-of-terrible-twos now and exerting his independence by means of tantrum. (Lord help you if you want to change his diaper, or if…
Read more →
Well, that was fast
Blink You blink, and six months go by. That’s what having kids is like, apparently. I could swear we were just gearing up for Thanksgiving, and now it’s spring and the daffodils are springing up. I just realized how long it’s been since I’ve even seen some of my closest friends. I used to joke about asking “What year is it?” And now, well, that question is starting to seem more legitimate every day. But haven’t got a lot of news, really. Lots of time spent at work, and a business trip to California. Saw my sister and brother-in-law out…
Read more →
When you’re Smiling
Every once in a while, I go back and reread the Reddit thread where they were first talking about Smile. Each time I read it, it’s a reminder of what I’m up against. There are a lot of interesting notions about what’s good in a programming language; everybody has their own pet feature: It has to be as fast as C! It has to allow infinite threads! It has to be 100% type-safe! It has to be type-inferring! It has to be designed for building web services! Did you see how X implemented generics!? And you’d better not leave out Intellisense!!!…
Read more →
ASP.NET WebForms Without The Suck
Time to Ruffle Some Feathers ASP.NET MVC gets all the notoriety these days in the Microsoft web-programming world. ASP.NET WebForms is kind of the ugly stepchild, sitting in the back corner, mostly neglected. “Did you see WebForms last week? He was awful, just awful,” say the voices at the party. “But MVC! MVC is sooo elegant. And so smart! Did you hear she was given early admission at Dartmouth?” Now, I’ve been coding for thirty years, and I’ve seen a lot of technologies, languages, and environments come and go. And Microsoft is a major, major offender in this category: They have a tendency of…
Read more →
And that was a year
Alan My son turns one year old tomorrow. Boggles the mind. Feels like he was born yesterday, or last week or something. This should explain pretty well where I’ve been lately. He’s a cute kid, and incredibly photogenic and well-behaved. My wife and I are really lucky. But, yes, he’s turning one, and my wife wishes he was still a cuddly tiny ball of joy, and instead he’s now a giggling toddler. This weekend, we’ll have everybody and their brother’s uncle’s cousin’s nephew’s former roommate dropping by for his birthday party. Gifts have already started filling the hall, and I’m…
Read more →
It’s baa-aack…!
Some of the more astute of you may have noticed that www.sixty-five.cc no longer points to www.sixty-five.cc — that’s because thanks to popular demand, SpaceMonger is coming back! Can I get a w00t from the audience? SpaceMonger is back: Because even when it wasn’t for sale anymore, we all couldn’t stop using it, myself included! I have partnered with the good folks at EdgeRunner to help bring SM back into existence, to help modernize SM’s code and bring this much-needed tool back to the public. We’ve been working together for a year now to bring it back, to make it…
Read more →
Continuation
I’m quite overdue for a status update, so here we go. I spent most of July with a busted ankle. Crutches are fun, I tells ya. That helps sum up the whole lotta nothin’ I did this month. It’s a really bad sprain I got late June, and it took many weeks and many doctors, and it’s still not fully healed yet, but at least I’m not on the crutches anymore. Oh, you want to know more about Smile, right. Y’all come here to find out what I’ve been coding, not for personal stuff. So let’s talk about Smile. The…
Read more →
Uniconundrum
I really want to get the Unicode support in Smile right. I really do. The unfortunate thing is that it seems there’s no consensus on what “right” looks like. Some people argue that UTF-8 is the right answer, some argue that UTF-16 is the right answer, some argue that UCS-4 is the right answer, and if you ask a hundred people, you get a hundred different answers as to what’s right. Y’all are complicatin’ my life ‘cuz ya can’t agree on nothin’, I tells ya what.
Let there be Unicode
So a few weeks ago, I was reading this essay by Ramsey Nasser. I’ve debated back and forth several times as to whether Smile should keep its strings and identifiers as 8-bit characters, or whether they should be upgraded to full Unicode. It’s a tough question. On the one hand, I’m trying to build a language that will be able to grow well with the needs of the future, and the future argues for Unicode. There are a lot of people out there, and not all of them speak English. Or read or write English. As Nasser notes, Arabic is…
Read more →