Andre Torrez offers some advice for those who think that they can clone a popular web app over the weekend. The best part — or the worst, if you’re the aspiring weekend programmer — is that each item on the list is a little Pandora’s box of Alice’s rabbit holes. Like this:
Lost password flow. You’ll want to generate a key and store it someplace for when someone requests to reset their password. So that’s another email that has to go out.
If you actually want your email to arrive at its destination, you’re gonna have to worry about all this. Or go through a third-party service, which is another interface (and bill (and moving part)) that you need to worry about. You get the point…making a web app work for more than just one person is hard, way harder than it looks unless you’ve done it.
Charles Babbage built one of the first mechanical calculating machines but Ada Lovelace was the first to show how the machine’s arithmetic function could be abstracted to produce things other than numbers: language, graphics, or music.
Cross-site scripting and SQL injection are the 1-2 punch of security weaknesses in 2010. Even when a software package doesn’t primarily run on the web, there’s a good chance that it has a web-based management interface or HTML-based output formats that allow cross-site scripting. For data-rich software applications, SQL injection is the means to steal the keys to the kingdom. The classic buffer overflow comes in third, while more complex buffer overflow variants are sprinkled in the rest of the Top 25.
5. You are not the best at programming. Live with it. — I always thought that I knew so much about programming, but there is always someone out there better than you. Always. Learn from them.
If you’re Dan Bricklin, co-inventor of the spreadsheet, how do you go about learning a new programming environment? Just like everyone else:
In mid-September I purchased a shiny new 24” Apple iMac and an iPhone 3GS. I signed up for the Apple iPhone Developer Program. I bought some books and started doing the tutorials, step by step. I came up with the idea for an app I needed and built a prototype, then plunged in and started creating a full app that would be good for others, too.
After writing The Cat in the Hat in 1955 using only 223 words, Dr. Seuss bet his publisher that he could write a book using only 50 words. Seuss collected on the wager in 1960 with the publication of Green Eggs and Ham. Here are the 50 distinct words used in the book:
a am and anywhere are be boat box car could dark do eat eggs fox goat good green ham here house I if in let like may me mouse not on or rain Sam say see so thank that the them there they train tree try will with would you
From a programming perspective, one of the fun things about Green Eggs and Ham is because the text contains so little information repeated in a cumulative tale, the story could be more efficiently represented as an algorithm. A simple loop would take the place of the following excerpt:
I do not like them in a box. I do not like them with a fox. I do not like them in a house. I do not like them with a mouse. I do not like them here or there. I do not like them anywhere. I do not like green eggs and ham. I do not like them, Sam I am.
But I don’t know…foreach (\$items as \$value) doesn’t quite have the same sense of poetry as the original Seuss.
Ingredients. 72 g haricot beans 101 eggs 108 g lard 111 cups oil 32 zucchinis 119 ml water 114 g red salmon 100 g dijon mustard 33 potatoes
Method. Put potatoes into the mixing bowl. Put dijon mustard into the mixing bowl. Put lard into the mixing bowl. Put red salmon into the mixing bowl. Put oil into the mixing bowl. Put water into the mixing bowl. Put zucchinis into the mixing bowl. Put oil into the mixing bowl. Put lard into the mixing bowl. Put lard into the mixing bowl. Put eggs into the mixing bowl. Put haricot beans into the mixing bowl. Liquefy contents of the mixing bowl. Pour contents of the mixing bowl into the baking dish.
Serves 1.
Ok, I think I get it now…the programs look like food recipes but act like code when run through the proper interpreter. Mmmm, fibonacci with caramel sauce! (via ben fry)
5.21. Prefer the standard to the offbeat Young writers Inexperienced programmers will be draw at every turn toward eccentricities in language. They will hear the beat of new vocabularies abstractions, the exciting rhythms of special segments of their society industry, each speaking a language of its own. All of us come under the spell of these unsettling drums; the problem for beginners is to listen to them, learn the words, feel the vibrations, and not be carried away.
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).
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.
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)
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.
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.”
Stay Connected