So when I started programming in 2001, it was du jour in the communities I participated in to be highly critical of other languages. Other languages

Print good, not bad!

My Friend Colin Woodard has a Seriously Brilliant Theory

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

My Plea to the W3C: Giving a semantic meaning to an "Obsolete" element. I'll cut right to the chase, here's my proposal: The `` element...

Been quite a fun week for people like me who enjoy following what’s happening in the various corners of the web. Since I have a bunch of scattered …

The speed of change in technology often appears to be the industry's defining characteristic. Nothing highlights that perception more than the recent and relentless march of AI advancements. But for as much as some things in technology change, many other things stay the same. Like vi! vi is a programming text editor that was created by...

Climate Change is happening and everyone is surprised. And yet we have known it was coming for over 50 years.

This post will be very plain. That is because is excellent in a way that is obvious and requires little explaining. is a minimalistic blogging service tha...

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.

It is with great sorrow but even greater fury that I have submitted my resignation from the NaNoWrimo Authors Board this morning. Why? Because they’ve come out with an absolutely insupportable posi…

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...

A case for planting more trees in urban areas.

The Arecibo Telescope in Purto Rico, used for SETI research until its collapse in 2020 (Source) Almost anyone with any interest in astronomy, space travel, astrophysics, or old-fashioned science fi…

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.

Sometimes we can get carried away with adding bells and whistles to websites thinking it somehow makes things better. At the end of the day, design should conform to purpose.