General Development Archive

Fifty years of BASIC

Submitted by KLU9 2014-04-30 General Development 57 Comments

I find the "everybody should learn to code" movement laudable. And yet it also leaves me wistful, even melancholy. Once upon a time, knowing how to use a computer was virtually synonymous with knowing how to program one. And the thing that made it possible was a programming language called BASIC.

Invented by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, BASIC was first successfully used to run programs on the school's General Electric computer system 50 years ago this week - at 4 a.m. on May 1, 1964, to be precise.

It's the only programming language I was ever somewhat proficient in (when I was about six years old). I never moved beyond it, and now, I know nothing about programming. BASIC has played a huge role in the history of computing, and its birthday deserves to be a thing.

My quest to build the ultimate music player

Thom Holwerda 2014-04-22 General Development 38 Comments

Over the past few years, I have been slowly but surely building my own music player. It's been a wild ride. The codebase has radically changed several times, but is always converging on a better music listening experience.

In this article my goal is to take you along for the ride.

Microsoft releases WinJS as open source

Thom Holwerda 2014-04-02 General Development 23 Comments

This project is actively developed by the WinJS developers working for Microsoft Open Technologies, in collaboration with the community of open source developers. Together we are dedicated to creating the best possible solution for HTML/JS/CSS application development.

Another bit of Build news: WinJS has been released under the Apache 2.0 license.

Android development articles for iOS developers

Thom Holwerda 2014-04-01 General Development 2 Comments

The online magazine objc.io has a new issue up - focusing on Android instead of iOS and OS X.

Admittedly, this started out as an April Fools' joke. But we quickly realized that we actually could make a really good issue about this. After all, it's interesting to Objective-C developers to learn something about what development on the other major mobile platform is like, as well as what we can learn from it.

A set of articles of specific interest to iOS developers wishing to get their toes wet on Android development. No politics, just code.

Enyo introduces Moonstone, Spotlight, Enyo 2.4

Guest post by toralux 2014-02-06 General Development 2 Comments

The webOS Enyo team has released Moonstone (UI) and Spotlight (user interaction) libraries as part of a new webOS TV SDK>, powering the next generation of LG Smart TV. There is also a new version of Enyo coming (2.4).

While Moonstone and Spotlight are certainly highlights of Enyo 2.4, you may be just as interested in the robust new data-layer support you’ll find in this release. Enyo 2.4 has support for observers, one- and two-way bindings, computed properties, models and collections, and a set of new data-aware UI controls.

Google Dart target: Chrome soon! Other browsers… Someday

Submitted by Hiev 2013-12-20 General Development 71 Comments

Google believes Dart speeds up both developers and the programs they write, but skeptics worry that it fragments Web programming and undermines the industry's focus on better JavaScript. So far, it's been a largely academic debate, but that will change in coming months.

That's because Google right now is building Dart technology directly into Chrome.

Does anyone here use Dart?

Booting to Rust

Submitted by Anonymous 2013-11-19 General Development 16 Comments

A couple nights ago I was looking over the UEFI spec, and I realized it shouldn't be too hard to write UEFI applications in Rust. It turns out, you can, and here I will tell you how.

Language gets me giddy, but thank god lots of other people get giddy over stuff like this.

OpenZFS launch announcement

Submitted by garyd 2013-09-17 General Development 54 Comments

ZFS is the world's most advanced filesystem, in active development for over a decade. Recent development has continued in the open, and OpenZFS is the new formal name for this open community of developers, users, and companies improving, using, and building on ZFS. Founded by members of the Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, and illumos communities, including Matt Ahrens, one of the two original authors of ZFS, the OpenZFS community brings together over a hundred software developers from these platforms.

ZFS plays a major role in Solaris, of course, but beyond that, has it found other major homes? In fact, now that we're at it, how is Solaris doing anyway?

Ruins of forgotten empires: APL languages

Thom Holwerda 2013-07-28 General Development 104 Comments

"There is a reason I use 'old' languages like J or Lush. It's not a retro affectation; I save that for my suits. These languages are designed better than modern ones. There is some survivor bias here; nobody slings PL/1 or Cobol willingly, but modern language and package designers don't seem to learn much from the masters. Modern code monkeys don't even recognize mastery; mastery is measured in dollars or number of users, which is a poor substitute for distinguishing between what is good and what is dumb. Lady Gaga made more money than Beethoven, but, like, so what?" This isn't just a thing among programmers. The entire industry is obsessed with user numbers, number of applications, and other crap that is meaningless when you consider programming to be art. When I post a new item about some small hobby operating system, the comments will be filled with negativity because it's no Windows or iOS, whereas only ten years ago, we'd have lively discussions about the implementation details. And then people wonder why that scene has died out.

Forth: the early years

Thom Holwerda 2013-07-25 General Development 14 Comments

"Forth is a simple, natural computer language. It has achieved remarkable acceptance where efficiency is valued. It evolved in the 1960s on a journey from university through business to laboratory. This is the story of how a simple interpreter expanded its abilities to become a complete programming language/operating system."

Visual Studio 2013 announced

Thom Holwerda 2013-06-03 General Development 27 Comments

"Today at TechEd, I announced Visual Studio 2013 and Team Foundation Server 2013 and many of the Application Lifecycle Management features that they include. I will not, in this post, be talking about many of the new VS 2013 features that are unrelated to the Application Lifecycle workflows. Stay tuned for more about the rest of the VS 2013 capabilities at the Build conference."

AIDE v2 adds C/C++ support

Guest post by fran 2013-05-18 General Development 14 Comments

Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."

Android Studio early access preview

Thom Holwerda 2013-05-15 General Development 25 Comments

"Android Studio is a new Android development environment based on IntelliJ IDEA. Similar to Eclipse with the ADT Plugin, Android Studio provides integrated Android developer tools for development and debugging." Lots of ooh's and aah's from the developer crowd as this one was demoed.

Seven traits of effective programmers

Guest post by MOS6510 2013-05-05 General Development 39 Comments

"In order to be an effective programmer, you need to possess a combination of traits that allow your skill, experience, and knowledge to produce working code. There are some technically skilled developers who will never be effective because they lack the other traits needed. Here are seven traits that are necessary to become a great programmer."

BlackBerry 10 API: worth your development time?

Thom Holwerda 2013-05-01 General Development 21 Comments

"BlackBerry 10 is completely different from previous BlackBerry operating systemsâ€”with good reason. Its core assets come from a company named QNX, which Research In Motion acquired in 2010. Blackberry 10 features include 'live tiles' that dynamically refresh with new information, as well as a revamped keyboard and security upgrades. But what really makes or breaks a phone is the quality (and quantity) of its third-party apps. So what we'll do here is look at the programming API. That will give us a good grip on what app developers can do with the platform."

A package manager for Xcode

Thom Holwerda 2013-04-24 General Development 5 Comments

"Alcatraz is an open-source package manager for Xcode. It lets you discover and install plugins, templates and color schemes without the need for manually cloning or copying files. It installs itself as a part of Xcode and it feels like home."

What makes code readable: not what you think

Guest post by MOS6510 2013-04-17 General Development 63 Comments

"You often hear about how important it is to write 'readable code'. Developers have pretty strong opinions about what makes code more readable. The more senior the developer, the stronger the opinion. But, have you ever stopped to think about what really makes code readable?"

Introduction to x64 assembly

Thom Holwerda 2013-04-05 General Development 31 Comments

"For years, PC programmers used x86 assembly to write performance-critical code. However, 32-bit PCs are being replaced with 64-bit ones, and the underlying assembly code has changed. This white paper is an introduction to x64 assembly. No prior knowledge of x86 code is needed, although it makes the transition easier."

21 nested callbacks

Thom Holwerda 2013-03-27 General Development 43 Comments

"Programming is hard. Don't ever feel bad because you aren't as good at 'just googling it' as the person next to you. Don't ever let hackathon snobs talk you out of creating the next Twitter for cats or Yelp for public washrooms. Even the dumbest ideas (like trying to make animated polygons disappear and reappear) will help you improve as a programmer. Learning to program is largely about learning to learn - and the best way to learn is to do." For some reason, I love this short story.

Duke Nukem 3D code review

Thom Holwerda 2013-02-15 General Development 66 Comments

"Since I left my job at Amazon I have spent a lot of time reading great source code. Having exhausted the insanely good idSoftware pool, the next thing to read was one of the greatest game of all time: Duke Nukem 3D and the engine powering it named 'Build'. It turned out to be a difficult experience: The engine delivered great value and ranked high in terms of speed, stability and memory consumption but my enthousiasm met a source code controversial in terms of organization, best practices and comments/documentation. This reading session taught me a lot about code legacy and what helps a software live long." Hail to the king, baby.