A guy who started working as a game programmer for Atari when he was 21 years old recounts his experiences, notably his work on the Donkey Kong cartridge.
Basically, Atari's marketing folks would negotiate a license to ship GameCorp's "Foobar Blaster" on a cartridge for the Atari Home Computer System. That was it. That was the entirety of the deal. We got ZERO help from the original developers of the games. No listings, no talking to the engineers, no design documents, nothing. In fact, we had to buy our own copy of the arcade machine and simply get good at the game (which was why I was playing it at the hotel - our copy of the game hadn't even been delivered yet).
(via girlhacker)
The programmers profiled in the 1986 book, Programmers at Work...where are they now?
Bill Gates. Then: founder of Microsoft, popularizer of the word "super". Now: richest guy in the world. After a stint in the 90s as pure evil, semi-retired to focus on philanthropic work.
by Casey Reas and Ben Fry
Casey Reas and Ben Fry, inventors of the Processing programming language (that's Proce55ing to you old schoolers), have just come out with a book on the topic that looks fantastic. In addition to programming tutorials are essays and interviews with other heavy hitters in the programmatic arts like Golan Levin, Alex Galloway, Auriea Harvey, and Jared Tarbell. The site for the book features a table of contents, sample chapters, and every single code example in the book, freely available for download. Amazon's got the book but they're saying it's 4-6 weeks for delivery so I suggest hoofing it over to your local bookstore for a look-see instead.
A brief history of programming languages from the September 1995 issue of Byte magazine. Amazing how many of these languages are now extinct or otherwise not widely used...and that Perl, PHP, Java, JavaScript, etc. didn't make the list.
Update: I corrected the above statement about Perl et. al. not existing and modified it to read that they didn't make the list. Perl, Ruby, nd Java all existed in one form or another in 1995. (thx to everyone who sent this in)
I was telling a friend this weekend about an article I'd read long ago about Larry Wall approaching the development of Perl as if it were a natural language. I think this is the article in question. Perl, the first postmodern computer language and a conversation with Larry Wall also touch on Perl and linguistics.
Update: Here's the original post to comp.lang.perl.misc by Wall. (thx, marc)
CodeIDE is an browser-based IDE for editing code. Supported languages include LISP, HTML, Basic, Perl, and JavaScript. My favorite bit is the scrolling list of results and error messages from other users.
Some of the onscreen special effects on Doctor Who were generated by a home computer called the BBC Micro. "A brief sequence during this program actually showed the BBC Basic and assembler code used to create the console display"
Bakeoff! A Gladwell article from back in September on a project that used different team methodologies to attempt to create the perfect cookie: an open source approach, an approach based on extreme programming, and a traditional hierarchical team. You may be surprised which team won.
We ran across the nerdiest board game today called c-jump, the computer programming game. More info: "Skiers and snowboarders line up at the start location and race along the ski trails. Spaces on the board show statements of programming language. First player to move all skiers past the finish line is the winner."
Update: here's the game's web site. "This game eliminates intimidation of many kids and their parents, bored by the mention of 'computer programming', often associated with visions of geeky guys glued to their computers."
Here's a story that mentions that Slashdot commenter that outsourced his job. "About a year ago I hired a developer in India to do my job. I pay him $12,000 out of the $67,000 I get. He's happy to have the work. I'm happy that I have to work only 90 minutes a day just supervising the code. My employer thinks I'm telecommuting. Now I'm considering getting a second job and doing the same thing."
Impressive demonstration of Ruby on Rails. "How to build a blog engine in 15 minutes with Ruby on Rails".
