May’s list of interesting prog/math/sci stuff:
To start off with, a post on being a programmer in your 40s, full of good tips (“forget the hype”, “learn about software history”, “teach”, “don’t take a job just for the money”, and other good stuff)
In the era of “leftpad”, someone asks, half-joking, half-despairing, whether software developers have given up
Bots are Hot! Yawn, right? Everyone knows this, right? Except this article is from twenty years ago, from the April 1996 issue of Wired magazine.
If we need software to be modular, to reuse and “plug in” parts from libraries and so on, some concept of Objects are inevitable
Clojure and Python aren’t so different after all (shown via a side-by-side Sudoku solving programs)
An old Minsky paper from 1970, on The limitations of using languages for description
This article inspired me to try Spacemacs, and it really was quite good. I just happen to have a large
.emacs, so after a few days change aversion kicked in and I moved back to “plain old Emacs”, but it’s definitely very well done, recommended for newbies, and something to keep an eye on.If you have time to watch one YouTube video, let it be THIS. The one and only Matthias Felleisen gives a keynote lecture at Clojure West 2016: “Types are like the weather, Type Systems are like weathermen”
My “to read” list keeps growing, but it doesn’t stop me from adding to it. This month’s entry: “Clever Algorithms: Nature-inspired Programming Recipes” (uses Ruby, but I’m sure it’s easily translatable to your favorite language)
Finally, a contrarian open-source opinion, by Bill Joy in an interview from a bit over a decade ago:
“Most people are bad programmers,” says Joy. “The honest truth is that having a lot of people staring at the code does not find the really nasty bugs. The really nasty bugs are found by a couple of really smart people who just kill themselves. Most people looking at the code won’t see anything … You can’t have thousands of people contributing and achieve a high standard.”
(Make of that what you will)