Friday, January 30, 2009

The goal for programming languages

I want the computer to do what I want it to do in the most painless (neigh, pleasant even!) way possible for me. C++ is not the language that will make the future happen. It gets horribly complex when you start doing anything advanced with templates. All these computers shipping now have idle processors just sitting there, right? I'd switch languages and take a performance hit in a heartbeat, if it will make doing easy things easy, and also make running on multiple processors not too hard.

What will programming languages be like in 100 years? If people are still using C++ in 100 years and through the miracle of modern medicine we all get to live to be too old, I pledge to kill myself in protest when I'm 130 years of age.

Programming tool rant

The company that makes Visual Assist tries to charge you $50 a year just to download the fixes to their buggy software. It's a necessity to have a tool like this to reduce the hideous drudge work and excess keystrokes that programming in C++ requires, but damn is it unfriendly to charge for fixing basic broken functionality.

Capitalism is the worst system designed, except for all the others.

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

The Egos of Programmers

Programmers have this thing where they're paid to handle all this complexity with their minds, and so programmers grade themselves and the other programmers around them by how much complexity and stuff they know. But you really want programmers to have a love of simplicity: tools should have a simple, pleasant interface, function calls should be easy to make and hard to screw up.

Thursday, January 15, 2009

Programmers are mostly bad writers

I find most general programming books to be agonizing to read now (two exceptions are Herb Sutter and Scott Meyers). That methodical, pedantic personality that fits with being a programmer does not produce good writing. And I get the feeling that every programming book author fears that other programmers are going to descend on him like ravenous crows and pick him apart if he is not 100% correct, even if being that correct makes it unreadable.

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Only strangers are cool

The only people who can be cool are people who are far away from you, like movie stars. Once I get to know a person, that coolness mystique wears off, and I see them as a human being, with all their flaws and foibles. There isn't one person I know who I think of as cool (beyond the decent person, easy-to-get-along-with meaning.)

Thursday, January 1, 2009

A 3% savings rate doesn't protect against inflation so...

The only good option is to spend immediately on hookers and blow before the money loses more value.