As a parent of three technically savvy kids I find it disturbing that we haven’t even “scratched” the surface of Scratch, an amazing, object-oriented programming language from the MIT Media Lab’sLifelong Kindergarten Group. That may change, however, as it’s much easier to get started in Scratch thanks to a new release of the platform that lives entirely in the… → Read More
Mitch Resnik, the creator of the super-simple Scratch programming language and head of the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab, gave a TEDx talk about the value of coding and computer literacy in early education. He posits that while today’s students are technically competent, they are consumers of technology rather than creators. It’s as if they can only read and not write. → Read More
With few exceptions, the world of developers (and startups in general), is really known for its scandals. But when Ruby icon Why the Luck Stuff (also known simply as _why) suddenly took all of his projects offline – including the famous Why’s (poignant) Guide to Ruby – offline in August 2009, there was quite a bit of uproar and anger in the programming community. _why had always guarded his… → Read More
For more than a few years now, engineering talent has been in high demand but it also seems that, of late, coding has become cool. Okay, maybe not cool, but thanks to a fleet of startups and companies like Codecademy, Treehouse, Code School, CodeNow, Khan and more, it’s becoming easier and easier to learn the basics of the world’s ubiquitous programming languages.
By bringing computer science… → Read More
The Raspberry Pi mini computer that’s become popular with the maker community but was originally conceived as a device to help kids learn how to code has had the lightweight TinyBASIC programming language ported to it — as a way for parents who haven’t done any programming since their school days to be able to share their old BASIC knowledge with their kids → Read More
Editor’s note: Marc Gayle is a Rails developer and founder of 5KMVP, where he builds Minimum Viable Products for just $5K. Follow him on Twitter.
A few months ago, I got the idea that one way to get leads for remote freelance gigs was to scour Craigslist. So, after doing the manual work of ‘crawling’ through at least 100 job postings by hand, I wrote a Ruby script to do the heavy lifting and… → Read More
One of the big trends of the past couple years, spurred the growing demand for programmers, is the rise of in-browser programming tutorials. Gone are the days when you’d have to buy a book and configure a development environment before you could get your hands dirty with a little code.
Maybe you want to start learning on your work computer and don’t have access to install a programming… → Read More
Y Combinator Summer 2012 graduate Data Nitro (formerly known as IronSpread) has a simple proposition: it enables you to to use the popular programming language Python in Microsoft Excel. The plugin is free for individual non-commercial and enterprises will pay for the privilege. So far it’s only available for the Excel 2007 and 2010 for Windows. The company has no plans to support OSX. → Read More
To paraphrase the late great David Foster Wallace, did you know that probing the seamy underbelly of software development reveals ideological strife and fanaticism on a nearly Godwin’s-law scale? Did you know that software development even had a seamy underbelly? It does, and its name is PHP, the world’s least-loved but arguably most-used programming language.
It’s loathed, it’s despised, and… → Read More
Program or Be Programmed author, CNN columnist and Frontline documentary director Douglas Rushkoff announced on his blog today that he’s taken a job with Codecademy, a company that offer free online programming courses entirely through a web-based interface. Rushkoff writes that he is joining the company as an evangelist much in the same capacity as Vint Cerf’s role at Google as a “net… → Read More
Minibloq is a programming language for Arduino motherboards designed to make it fun and easy for kids to make their own microprocessor projects.
How does it work? Well, it’s a bit convoluted but you basically plug in a board and program it using either graphical objects or text source code. It’s completely portable and runs on multiple platforms including the OLPC. The product will be technically… → Read More
If you were alive in 1978 you’ll probably remember you couldn’t do much with a computer. The Altair had just hit the scene and BASIC was taking off but there was very little a kid of a certain age and predilection could do with this information. Luckily there were guys like David Ahl. → Read More
A certain subset of computer users – those aged in their late twenties to middle-late 30s – will remember Radio Shack with absolutely fondness. I, for one, used to think of the Shack (as it’s now to be called) as a den of iniquity staffed by people who knew a thing or two about electronics. Those days are long gone, but it’s nice to read posts like Jeff Reifman’s… → Read More
There are so many programming languages that I can’t keep track of them all any more. Presumably each has specific strengths and weaknesses, but I couldn’t tell you what those are, nor under which circumstances any particular language is the best one for the job. Lots of people are still using Fortran, for example, which I was led to believe was as dead as the Dodo. Given the mind-boggling number… → Read More
Check out this custom made iPhone app that robotics student Robert Stephenson created. Robert wrote this app to control his Hexapod robot using the the user inputs on the iPhone. → Read More
Has the Internet changed the way you think and act even when you’re not at a computer? It has me. I find myself speaking in LOLcat when I’m making puns with my friend. I find myself thinking in terms of regular expressions when I want to correct something I’ve said. I rarely remember URLs anymore, instead focusing on the search terms I fed to Google to find the sites I use. → Read More
How long does it take to create a standard in the tech industry? Let’s put it this way: we’re still waiting for the final word on videotapes (die, Betacam, die). So when you hear that a universal interface between applications and computing hardware has been hammered out in six months, you better be impressed. A team with members from NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel among others has finished… → Read More
For those of you who do not remember – or do not care to remember – OpenClip was supposed to be an open framework for implementing the Cocoa NSPasteboard functionality to the iPhone. While I’m thinking that if Apple wanted to implement copy/paste into the iPhone they would have done it already or will do it soon, OpenClip was a noble effort to work around the limitations of OS X… → Read More
This is really cool. This guy wrote an app that essentially saves the signal strength at a given location and then collates the data points into a little map, giving an approximate location of the access point and the places where one finds the best average signal. This seems really practical to me; if it’s not too hard to do, IT departments around the globe might take it up and use it to… → Read More
Oh for the love of God, now what? Surely by now you’ve heard about the long-delayed (to put it mildly) XM-Sirius merger, which is really more of a Sirius buyout of XM, but let’s not nuance ourselves to death. So yeah, now it looks like the merger won’t be allowed to take place unless the combined company agrees to set aside 25 percent of its bandwidth for minority and… → Read More
According to BusinessWeek, Nokia’s Dr. Ari Jaaski told a group of open source developers on Tuesday that they need to “obey” certain business rules, such as DRM, intellectual property rights, SIM locking, and subsidized business models. Last time I checked, open source developers generally write applications that fulfill a need that’s otherwise gone unfulfilled – and most of those… → Read More
Jacob Seidelin is fast becoming the Ben Heckendorn of Javascript games. You may remember that in early April, Seidelin programmed all of Super Mario Bros. into 14 Kb of Javascript code. This month, he’s tackled Super Mario Kart in about 11 Kb of code. It’s not the full game, however. “So far, it’s just racing. No weapons or any of that fancy stuff. At the moment, you can… → Read More
Tamir Khason wrote an article about four years ago theorizing that there’s a direct correlation between the modern-day popularity of a particular programming language and how much facial hair the inventor of that language has. He’s now revisited the subject in a new post called Computer Languages and Facial Hair — Take Two. The inventors of the following languages have (or had)… → Read More
Congratulations to Bernie Peng and his soon-to-be-wife Tammy Li! The happy couple just got engaged via a hacked version of “Bejeweled” that Bernie programmed to reveal his proposal once Tammy hit a certain score. Seattle-based PopCap, makers of “Bejeweled,” is so F-ing excited about all the publicity this little stunt has created that it’s offered to fly the Pengs out… → Read More
There’s an interesting (and somewhat long) read over on eWeek.com for those of you that get a little moist about declarative programming languages. Microsoft’s “Oslo” strategy, announced in October, has given way to a new programming language currently known only as “D” that’ll pass the “two-beer test” — as in, it’ll supposedly be… → Read More
Ah, there’s nothing better than passionate users. The Wall Street Journal recently ran a holiday poll asking "Which of these items are you most likely to purchase as a gift?" The iPod and Zune were two of the choices and when the final numbers had been tallied, the iPod received 62% of the vote and "in a highly improbable move, Zune surged from less than 1% through most of the… → Read More
Wiki image, dontcha know? Surely you’ve heard of the German Enigma machine and the Allied efforts to crack it during World War II. Well researchers, using a rebuilt Colossus machine (yup, that’s it right there), wanted to see how fast they could crack similar codes, only they made it into a contest. They invited amateur coders to see who could crack the code first: a giant… → Read More
I see you see me Erica from TUAW got Bonjour up and running on her iPhone and iPod touch. At this point it’s really just a proof of concept—all it can do is send pictures from the iPhone to the Touch—so it’s yet another example of doing something for the sake of it. That’s right now, at least. In the future, with a little more tinkering, Erica says it could be… → Read More
Andy at SuccessfulSoftware.net created a piece of software that he submitted to a number of download sites. He was immediately bombarded by “Five Star Awards” from a number of the shadier ones in what essentially became a linkback spam attempt. In order to test his hypothesis — that these awards are bogus — he created an app called “awardmestars.” He quickly… → Read More
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