Programming should be easy

Programming has been a very elitist and oblique field to beginners. Many programmers take great pride in the fact that their language is not easy to learn and that it needs a serious investment to understand. Often they do this secretly while outwardly claiming that they prefer easy to understand and simple code. Bjarne Stroustrup…

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I Cthulhu

Here’s a great short story by hugo-award-winning fantasy author neil gaiman titles I Cthulhu referring to a fictional creature created by H. P. Lovecraft. The story is great, but read for yourself: Cthulhu, they call me. Great Cthulhu. Nobody can pronounce it right. Are you writing this down? Every word? Good. Where shall I start…

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A nice C++ compiler

C++ was my first real “production” language and my first encounters were really ghastly. Why would anybody use sth. this hard to use with such useless error messages? It just seemed so pointless to write a program that would need a lot of explanation to make itself understood to the user. The video is about…

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Improving design

I haven’t used CSS in a while and it’s amazing what effects you can achieve with some simple stylesheets. One thing I really like are the “intelligent” CSS selectors. Instead of dealing awkwardly with classes and polluting your Django views with design decisions, you can simply include some cool CSS. Image from W3 Take for…

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Working with Google App Engine

Google App Engine (GAE) is a service that lets you run your web apps in The Cloud. It’s a magical place where everything runs faster and better. Cumulus cloud from Wikipedia In reality the cloud is not really one technique but rather a slightly overused term for running applications on remote computer in a data…

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Dabbling in web development with Django

I’ve wanted to develop for the web for quite some time. When I was younger I did some web design. But back then it meant that you probably had to learn ActionScript to get any kind of visually impressive design. Today most of it can be done with simple HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Fortunately there’s…

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New C++

The new standard that was approved last year, will bring a lot of improvements to C++ and reduce some of the gap to Java. Some of Java’s newest additions like lambda and the foreach loop have been taken over to C++ without much change. Watch the above video for some mindblowing (at least for programmers)…

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