coding

Attention, Spoiled Software Engineers: Take a Lesson from Google’s Programming Language

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Attention, Spoiled Software Engineers: Take a Lesson from Google’s Programming Language

Many of today’s programmers—excuse me, software engineers—consider themselves “creatives.” Artists of a sort. They are given to ostentatious personal websites with cleverly hidden Easter eggs and parallax scrolling; they confer upon themselves multihyphenate job titles (“ex-Amazon-engineer-investor-author”) and crowd their laptops with identity-signaling vinyl stickers. Some regard themselves as literary sophisticates. Consider the references smashed into … Read more

Back to BASIC—the Most Consequential Programming Language in the History of Computing

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Back to BASIC—the Most Consequential Programming Language in the History of Computing

For someone just getting into this weird craft, BASIC felt positively thaumaturgic. It was spellcasting: You uttered words that brought iron and silicon to life, and made them do things. (As the software engineer Erin Spiceland puts it, coding is “telling rocks what to think.”) If you were, as I was, marinated in Tolkien and … Read more

The AI-Powered Future of Coding Is Near

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The AI-Powered Future of Coding Is Near

I am by no means a skilled coder, but thanks to a free program called SWE-agent, I was just able to debug and fix a gnarly problem involving a misnamed file within different code repositories on the software-hosting site GitHub. I pointed SWE-agent at an issue on GitHub and watched as it went through the … Read more

The Eternal Truth of Markdown

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The Eternal Truth of Markdown

Markdown became a core part of how I wrote. The simplicity and flexibility meant I would live the dream of write once, run anywhere. It did lead to some ambiguity, though. Gruber would probably say this is by design. His emphasis throughout the Markdown documentation is on the syntax of Markdown, not—say—the resulting HTML. His … Read more

Inside the Cult of the Haskell Programmer

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Inside the Cult of the Haskell Programmer

At the same time, I understood almost immediately why Haskell was—and still is—considered a language more admired than used. Even one of its most basic concepts, that of the “monad,” has spawned a cottage industry of explainers, analogies, and videos. A notoriously unhelpful explanation, famous enough to be autocompleted by Google, goes: “A monad is … Read more

How I Became a Python Programmer—and Fell Out of Love With the Machine

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How I Became a Python Programmer—and Fell Out of Love With the Machine

The difficulty with any new programming language is the sharp learning curve, all that drudgery and bashing your forehead into the keyboard. There was no Codecademy or Stack Overflow in those days. We bought books from the likes of O’Reilly and No Starch Press. I bought Learning Python and skimmed the first few chapters, but … Read more

JavaScript Runs the World—Maybe Even Literally

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JavaScript Runs the World—Maybe Even Literally

Lex Fridman has done many long interviews on his popular podcast. Even so, the episode with the legendary programmer John Carmack has an unhinged director’s-cut feel to it. Over five hours, Carmack dishes on everything from vector operations to Doom. But it’s something Fridman says, offhand, that really justifies the extended run time: “I think … Read more

Google’s Deal With StackOverflow Is the Latest Proof That AI Giants Will Pay for Data

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Google’s Deal With StackOverflow Is the Latest Proof That AI Giants Will Pay for Data

Last year Stack Overflow became one of the first websites to announce it would charge AI giants for access to content used to train chatbots. Now the popular Q&A service for coders has signed up its first customer—Google—in what CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar says is the start of a “meaningful” new stream of revenue. The deal … Read more

Tech Job Interviews Are Out of Control

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Tech Job Interviews Are Out of Control

Bock says the shift is partly due to mass layoffs; employers are more able to flex their muscles in a tighter labor market. But there’s also a broader psychological shift. “After years of tech workers being pampered, of ‘bring your whole selves to work’ and ‘work from anywhere,’ executives are now overcompensating in the other … Read more

AI Tools Like GitHub Copilot Are Rewiring Coders’ Brains. Yours May Be Next

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AI Tools Like GitHub Copilot Are Rewiring Coders’ Brains. Yours May Be Next

Many people—like, say, journalists—are understandably antsy about what generative artificial intelligence might mean for the future of their profession. It doesn’t help that expert prognostications on the matter offer a confusing cocktail of wide-eyed excitement, trenchant skepticism, and dystopian despair. Some workers are already living in one potential version of the generative AI future, though: … Read more