This is a website, which means it sometimes goes offline

Print good, not bad!

Building the right thing shouldn't take very long -- doing away with nonsense makes product development really fast"

Exceptions are often a better way to handle errors than returning them as values. We argue that traditional exceptions provide better user and developer experience, and show that they even result in faster execution.

Git blame an infrastructure update

If you want to create digital artifacts that last, they must be files you can control, in formats that are easy to retrieve and read. Use tools that give you...

This must be what killed the old No Time To Play wiki. You can thank "progress".

Lisp is an ambiguous category. But Common Lisp isn't, right? It's a restricted self-sufficient language, after all.

While ncurses still has a place in the modern world, ANSI escape codes may be better in some situations:

• you can use (almost) any programming language, not just those that have a curses binding or a foreign function interface;
• you're literally just printing out some short codes: that's both efficient and liberating;
• you can use features that modern terminal emulators have, but (n)curses doesn't.

As for the downsides:

• ANSI escapes are like coding in machine language – you'll need a cheatsheet;
• some hardware videoterminals never supported the standard;
• ncurses does more useful work besides translating for those old things.

It's still good to have another tool in the toolbox, doubly so when it's easy and fun to tinker with.

The one where I share my dislike for WordPress (again)

DRAFT! work in progress!

In the 1990s, computers were magic and we were wizards. Want proof? I offer below, Larry Wall’s foreword to Learning Perl from 1993. It greatly inspired a very young me who wandered into a book shop, picked up an odd book with llama on the cover and a seemingly misspelled title. The first few pages […]

An in-depth look at the Ada programming language, its history, and what it has to offer developers today. As well as a fistful of my humble opinions.