How to make a sport of out getting out of debt, part one

[pseydtonne]

It's not that I don't have a lot to say. I've just been talking about different topics and spending more time in Reddit and Hubski. I like Hubski in particular because it's a much smaller community built in reaction to the dominant snark of news aggregate sites. This forces me to toss my first two thoughts, take questions seriously, and really say

Comments

[mmcirvin]

It never crashes

One of my favorite programming books is by Microsoft Press: it's by Steve Maguire and is called Writing Solid Code. You might wonder how a great book about programming could come out of Microsoft, but it makes more sense when you realize that Maguire was in charge of Excel, which, whatever else you can say about it, is at least extraordinarily stable and reliable for a Microsoft product (and that's what the book is about). He airs some dirty laundry in there, too, talking about ways in which the project got into trouble and had to get out of it again.

[mmcirvin]

Oh, yeah, and the sequel, Debugging the Development Process, is also pretty good. I think that's the one that begins with the line "This book might make Microsoft look bad."

[mmcirvin]

It occurs to me that something like Stephen Wolfram's "notebook" interface for Mathematica might be a useful pedagogical stepping stone between spreadsheets and actual coding. There are cells, but they're in a notional time sequence instead of a grid, and you can put arbitrarily complex function definitions in them, or do one thing in each cell and re-execute the whole notebook to see the results of a change. It's sort of like an arbitrarily editable abstraction of an interactive terminal session.

(There are user interfaces for other languages that imitate it, including the IPython Notebook and the open-source computer algebra system Sage.)

[tenshikurai9]

Not too young for college over here.