Perl. Knuth. Liskov. Cobol. Interview with Dan Bricklin. Dan Bricklin is best known for creating VisiCalc along with Bob Frankston in 1979. Since that time he has been active as a software developer and entrepreneur. His new book is Bricklin on Technology. I quoted Dan Bricklin in a blog post a few weeks ago and he left a couple comments in the discussion. This started an email correspondence that lead to the following interview. JC: Do you ever feel that the fame of VisiCalc has overshadowed some of your more recent accomplishments? DB: It had better. VisiCalc was a pretty big thing to have done, and I’m very happy that I had the opportunity to make such a big contribution to the world. JC: What would your 30-second bio be without VisiCalc? DB: I am a long-term toolmaker and commentator in the area of the personal use of computing power.
JC: What are you doing these days as a programmer? DB: I have been working on an Open Source JavaScript-based spreadsheet called SocialCalc. JC: What trends do you see in software development? Related posts: Q&A: Slavoj Zizek, professor and writer. Slavoj Zizek, 59, was born in Ljubljana, Slovenia. He is a professor at the European Graduate School, international director of the Birkbeck Institute for Humanities in London and a senior researcher at the University of Ljubljana's institute of sociology. He has written more than 30 books on subjects as diverse as Hitchcock, Lenin and 9/11, and also presented the TV series The Pervert's Guide To Cinema.
When were you happiest? A few times when I looked forward to a happy moment or remembered it - never when it was happening. What is your greatest fear? To awaken after death - that's why I want to be burned immediately. What is your earliest memory? My mother naked. Which living person do you most admire, and why? Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the twice-deposed president of Haiti. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? Indifference to the plights of others.
What is the trait you most deplore in others? Their sleazy readiness to offer me help when I don't need or want it. Nothing, I hope. The A-Z of Programming Languages: Modula-3. Computerworld is undertaking a series of investigations into the most widely-used programming languages. Previously we have spoken to Alfred v. Aho of AWK fame, S. Tucker Taft on the Ada 1995 and 2005 revisions, Microsoft about its server-side script engine ASP, Chet Ramey about his experience maintaining Bash, Bjarne Stroustrup of C++ fame, to Charles H. Moore about the design and development of Forth, a chat with the irreverent Don Woods about the development and uses of INTERCAL and most recently, Stephen C. Johnson on YACC. In this interview, we chat with Luca Cardelli, a member of the Modula-3 design committee. Cardelli is a Principal Researcher and Head of the Programming Principles and Tools and Security groups at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK, and is an ACM Fellow. Please note that we are no longer following exact alphabetical order for this series, due to popular demand.
Why did you feel the need to develop Modula-3? Why was the name Modula-3 chosen? Hacking a Google Interview. Questions Five Ways - Concurrency. It's time for the first of my Questions Five Ways posts. This time I approached five programmers that do a lot of work with concurrency. Three of them responded (Tony Arcieri (@bascule), Venkat Subramaniam (@venkat_s), and MenTaLguY (@mentalguy). Here are the responses they came up with. Please help continue this discussion by sharing your thoughts in the comments below. Which 2-3 languages/approaches should a programmer be studying to move toward a more concurrent future? Tony Well, besides Reia... :) 1) Erlang: Obviously I believe in the actor model quite a bit, which is the basis of Erlang's approach to concurrency. 2) Haskell: In some regards Haskell is farther along than Erlang when it comes to concurrency, and provides multiple different models for different types of concurrency, whereas Erlang pretty much forces you to use one (the actor model/shared nothing concurrency).
At any given time, as a professional programmer you should be studying a language. Interview with an Adware Author. Matt Knox, a talented Ruby instructor and coder, talks about his early days designing and writing adware for Direct Revenue. (Direct Revenue was sued by Eliot Spitzer in 2006 for allegedly surreptitiously installing adware on millions of computers.) S: You wrote adware. You bastard. M: [sheepishly] Yes, I did. S: Let’s back up a second. M: I was utterly and grindingly broke for a little while. It was funny. S: Did you feel this was the gently sloping path to Hell? M: Oh yeah! S: What was Direct Revenue’s business model?
M: Their business model was that they would buy a screensaver from somebody, or develop it themselves. S: What did they call it? M: The good distributors would say, ‘This is ad-supported software.” S: Your company’s not one of those that would leverage exploits in order to get software on people’s computers? M: We didn’t, no. The thing that I had a real problem with was the persistence work that I was doing. S: Can you tell me more about your strategies for persistence? 100 Interview Questions for Software Developers. Keith Braithwaite, an Agile Skeptic. In this interview made by InfoQ’s Amr Elssamadisy during Agile 2008, Keith Braithwaite, an Agile developer, consultant and trainer, says that we should show a good deal of skepticism towards today’s Agile practice. Watch: Keith Braithwaite, an Agile Skeptic (32 min.) Keith confesses he is an Agile skeptic, not because Agile is wrong in its essence but because Agile is perceived and practiced in ways that distort its base principles.
Many failures occur and they shed a negative light over the entire Agile movement because too many times one thinks that buying an Agile book or tool is enough to ensure project success. Keith suggests students in Agile should be rigorously tested and a certain level of experience should be imposed in order to graduate someone as Agile coach. Stories of Apple. 16 interviews w/Linux hackers.
Nov 14, 2008 The Linux Foundation has published a series of video interviews from the annual Linux Kernel Summit held Sept. 15-16 in Portland, Oregon. In the videos, 16 developers — including Linux creator Linus Torvalds (shown at left) — discuss their development activities. The Kernel Summit is an annual invitation-only meeting during which kernel developers discuss the current state of the Linux kernel and plans for future development.
Below are links to the 16 kernel developer interviews from the Summit. Each is 5-10 minutes in length, and is available for viewing in Ogg and Flash formats. Click each developer’s name to watch the a video. Linus Torvalds of The Linux Foundation – speaks about the Linux Kernel Summit and shares his thoughts on kernel quality, regressions and the state of the current release cycle. A detailed report on what took place at the Summit can be found here. Lots of interesting insights into the status and future of Linux! About the Linux Foundation. Little Known Ways to Ruby Mastery by Jamie van Dyke. A weekly series from the Ruby Masters We’re excited to launch a new interview series on the RL blog – “Path to Ruby Mastery” – by top trainers and developers in the Ruby community, from across the globe.
The interview series will provide insight and commentary from these notable Ruby trainers and developers, with the goal of facilitating and providing answers to the questions Ruby beginners face. We welcome your suggestions for interviewees and questions. Look for a new post every Tuesday! We’re proud to have Jamie van Dyke from the UK, kick off the series. Satish Talim>> Welcome, Jamie and thanks for helping with the inaugural “Path to Ruby Mastery” post and for taking out time to share your thoughts. Jamie>> I’m Jamie van Dyke. Willian Molinari, Brazil>> How should one go about learning the Ruby language? Jamie>> I wholeheartedly recommend the Beginning Ruby book by Peter Cooper. Of course, there’s nothing like a good training course either. Possibly Related Posts: The A-Z of Programming Languages: Python. Computerworld is undertaking a series of investigations into the most widely-used programming languages.
Previously we have spoken to Alfred v. Aho of AWK fame, S. Tucker Taft on the Ada 1995 and 2005 revisions, Microsoft about its server-side script engine ASP, Chet Ramey about his experiences maintaining Bash, Bjarne Stroustrup of C++ fame and to Charles H. Moore about the design and development of Forth. We've also had a chat with the irreverent Don Woods about the development and uses of INTERCAL, as well as Stephen C. This time we chat with Guido van Rossum, Monty Python and Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy fan. Please note that we are no longer following exact alphabetical order for this series, due to popular demand.
What was the motivation behind the development of such a productive programming language? Long ago, around 1989, at CWI in Amsterdam, I was part of a group developing a novel operating system. Was there a particular problem you were trying to solve? The A-Z of Programming Languages: JavaScript. Computerworld is undertaking a series of investigations into the most widely-used programming languages. Previously we have spoken to Alfred v. Aho of AWK fame, S. Tucker Taft on the Ada 1995 and 2005 revisions, Microsoft about its server-side script engine ASP, Chet Ramey about his experience maintaining Bash, Bjarne Stroustrup of C++ fame, to Charles H. Moore about the design and development of Forth, a chat with the irreverent Don Woods about the development and uses of INTERCAL, Stephen C. Johnson on YACC, Modula-3 design committee member, Luca Cardelli and Walter Bright about D In this interview we chat to Brendan Eich, creator of JavaScript and Chief Technology Officer of Mozilla Corporation.
Eich details the development of JS from its inception at Netscape in 1995, and comments on its continued popularity, as well as what he believes will be the future of client-side scripting languages on the Web. What prompted the development of JavaScript? See my blog post, linked above. The A-Z of Programming Languages: D. Computerworld is undertaking a series of investigations into the most widely-used programming languages. Previously we have spoken to Alfred v. Aho of AWK fame, S. Tucker Taft on the Ada 1995 and 2005 revisions, Microsoft about its server-side script engine ASP, Chet Ramey about his experience maintaining Bash, Bjarne Stroustrup of C++ fame, to Charles H. Moore about the design and development of Forth, a chat with the irreverent Don Woods about the development and uses of INTERCAL, Stephen C. Johnson on YACC and most recently Modula-3 design committee member, Luca Cardelli. In this interview, we chat to Walter Bright about D and his desire to improve on systems programming languages.
Please note that we are no longer following exact alphabetical order for this series, due to popular demand. What prompted the development of D? Being a compiler developer, there's always at the back of my mind the impetus for applying what I know to design a better language. There was no specific problem. The A-Z of Programming Languages: INTERCAL. Computerworld is undertaking a series of investigations into the most widely-used programming languages. Previously we have spoken to Alfred v.
Aho of AWK fame, S. Tucker Taft on the Ada 1995 and 2005 revisions, Microsoft about its server-side script engine ASP, Chet Ramey about his experience maintaining Bash, Bjarne Stroustrup of C++ fame, and to Charles H. Moore about the design and development of Forth, and Stephen C. In this interview, Computerworld ventures down a less serious path and chats to Don Woods about the development and uses of INTERCAL. Woods currently works at Google, following the company's recent acquisition of Postini, and he is best known for co-writing the original Adventure game with Will Crowther.
How did you and James Lyon get the urge to create such an involved spoof language? I'm not entirely sure. Why did you choose to spoof FORTRAN and COBOL in particular? We didn't. What prompted the name Compiler Language With No Pronounceable Acronym? The Creators of 30 Programming Languages. Behind any programming language there is a creator or sometimes a small team. Each language has a story and a philosophy and each creator had a motivation, a problem to solve. Programming languages influence and sometimes determine the way programmers solve problems and the way problems can be solved.
They gain supporters, make enemies and cause flames and “religious” wars. I think it is very useful for every programmer to understand the history of programming languages and also to understand the reasoning and the way of thinking of the programming language designers; for the programming languages you love but, even more, for those you don’t like or understand. I compiled here a list of languages with their creators and some links to information about them. Most of the interviews are extremely interesting. For an in depth analysis of programming language popularity read:13 reasons why Ruby, Python and the gang will push Java to die… of old age.