Category Archives: Programming

Advanced Hashing Techniques

Posted on 2018-10-16 by jcs

One of the first advanced programming techniques I learned back when I was beginning was the use of hashing for fast table lookup. The use of the adjective “advanced” probably looks strange to younger engineers who are used to languages … Continue reading →

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Python for Lisp Programmers

Posted on 2018-06-05 by jcs

Back in 2000, Peter Norvig was getting complaints that the code in his and Stuart Russell’s book, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach was in Lisp, that many of the students using the book didn’t know Lisp, and that they didn’t … Continue reading →

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Emacs 26, Threads, and Generators

Posted on 2018-06-02 by jcs

One of the things that a lot of people are exited about in Emacs 26 is the introduction of basic threading. Another, less mentioned, feature is generators. The excellent Chris Wellons has a must-read post that talks about both of … Continue reading →

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Recursion

Posted on 2018-06-01 by jcs

Mike Zamansky has an interesting post on recursion. The question at hand is whether it makes sense to teach recursion to beginning programming students. Zamansky was a high school CS teacher for many years and now he’s involved—at least in … Continue reading →

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Programs that Program

Posted on 2018-04-25 by jcs

I’ve written before about Eric Raymond’s (esr) UPSide project that aims to build an open source UPS that has reasonable performance and sensible operation. Esr’s latest post is especially interesting to me because it uses one of my favorite techniques: … Continue reading →

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Comments

Posted on 2017-12-22 by jcs

One of the perennial programmer arguments—not quite up there with Emacs v. Vim but enduring nonetheless—is whether or not we should comment our code and if so, how. some folks say that the need for comments is a code smell: … Continue reading →

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An Elisp Introduction

Posted on 2017-08-19 by jcs

A couple of years ago, I wrote about Aaron Bieber’s talk to the Boston Vim Meetup on why and how he moved from Vim to Emacs. It was a great talk and worth watching if you haven’t already (especially if … Continue reading →

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Get in the Flow!

Posted on 2017-07-01 by jcs

Via Karl Voit, here’s something you can post on your office door or outside your cubical. Of course, as we all know, it won’t do any good but you’ll feel better. pic.twitter.com/XLeEYUJp78 — Carlos Gustavo Ruiz (@atmantree) June 8, 2017

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35 Coding Habits to Avoid

Posted on 2017-05-21 by jcs

Christian Maioli Mackeprang has an interesting post on 35 habits that can negatively affect your coding. I’ll let you read them and make your own judgments as to their value for your situation but I’d like to comment on two … Continue reading →

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A Simple Programming Praxis Solution in Elisp

Posted on 2017-04-07 by jcs

Programming Praxis has a simple problem that is meant to explore how easy your favorite programming language makes it to work with strings. The problem is to double every blank in a string. That’s pretty simple but some languages make … Continue reading →

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