jaydubya’s blog

I got a kick out of reading this article. Granted, I probably don’t program half as well as even a “crappy” programmer; nevertheless, I found a few of the points entertaining, especially this guy’s take on UML:

• You model all your code in UML before you write it.

Enthusiastic UML modeling is typically done by those who aren’t strong coders, but consider themselves software architects anyway. Modeling tools appeal most to those who think coding can be done in conference room by manipulating little charts. The charts aren’t the design, and will never be the design, that’s what the code is for.

Basically, I just felt special because I knew what the acronym stood for.

20 years ago… 1987… the year I was born

Looking for ideas for my next blog entry, I googled “programming now versus 20 years ago”, and this came up #1. This link is to some guy named chefelf’s online journal and contains his thoughts on various topics and the ways they have changed within the last 20 years. Although not particularly well written, the article brings up some good points, and they remind me of instances in my childhood.

Regarding audio recording, tape cassettes were king. I still remember taping the radio onto cassettes through my boom box. I didn’t get my first CD until I was in 5th grade.

Videogames– My aunt had an NES and I thought she was the coolest. I remember going over to her house and playing Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt during the great flood of the Mississippi River in 1993, when my family had to drive to the next town over for clean drinking water.

Telephones– I got my first cellphone my junior year of high school; now I don’t know what I would do without one. I remember going to my Cub Scout leader’s house and seeing a caller ID for the first time. It was a standalone wall-mounted white box about the size of a brick of Ramen noodles.

Movie Rental Places– I used to love to rent VHS tapes from down the road, and I remember watching by first movie in widescreen at home and thinking it was the stupidest thing ever to have black bars on the top and bottom of the screen. Today, I can’t stand fullscreen and I don’t even own a VHS player.

The world has changed a lot in the last 20 years, especially when it comes to technology.

I found this very interesting diagram through Digg. It plots many of the high-level programming languages from the 50s to present day– all the way from Fortran to C#, Java, and PHP.

I found an interesting article through Digg regarding the programming language F#.  It is a functional programming language developed by Microsoft.  Apparently, the language is more academic and mathematically complex than C#, but is interchangeable through the .NET framework and Common Language Runtime.  The F# language was written based on the principles of lambda calculus, which was the brainchild of Alonzo Church.  The writer of this article argues that the rise of dynamic and functional programming languages and their interchangeability may very well mark the rise of a software development renaissance.