Mirk - Slashdot User

Petition Obama to mandate free access to research-> 0

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Mirk

on Monday May 21, @07:19AM

Mirk writes "The UK and the European Union are both in the process of introducing mandates that all publicly funded research must be publicly accessible. At the moment, the USA has no concrete plans to do the same. But Open Access advocates have the ear of Obama's scientific advisor and think there's a good chance this could change — PROVIDED that citizens show it's an issue we care about. So please sign the Whitehouse.org petition at http://wh.gov/6TH"
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Doctor Who: what's in the Pandorica? (No spoilers)-> 0

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Mirk

on Wednesday June 16 2010, @09:03PM

Mirk writes "Season Five of Doctor Who — the first season to feature Matt Smith as the Eleventh Doctor — is drawing to a close. Only the final two-part story remains to be shown, consisting of The Pandorica Opens and The Big Bang. But what is inside the Pandorica? With only a few days left before the episode is broadcast, The Reinvigorated Programmer speculates, on the possibilities."
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The 11th Doctor hits his stride (The Beast Below)-> 0

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Mirk

on Saturday April 10 2010, @07:39PM

Mirk writes "Matt Smith, the 11th actor to take the eponymous lead role in Doctor Who, got off to a rocky start in his first episode, The Eleventh Hour. In his second outing, The Beast Below, Smith is starting to emerge from the long shadow cast by his predecessor David Tennant. This review looks at how the second episode the new series exemplifies all the things we have come to love about Doctor Who."
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Doctor Who: first impressions of the 11th Doctor-> 0

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Mirk

on Saturday April 03 2010, @05:08PM

Mirk writes "The first episode of Doctor Who's new series 5 has just aired on BBC1 in the UK. This is an important episode for the show because so much has changed: Matt Smith plays the new Doctor, replacing David Tennant, and Karen Gillan portrays a new companion, Amy Pond. Maybe most important, Russell T. Davies is replaced as showrunner by Stephen Moffat, who's known for acclaimed Doctor Who scripts including The Empty Child and Blink. The Reinvigorated Programmer offers an early review of the new Doctor, companion, showrunner, and series."
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"Simplicity" in programming: two opposing views-> 0

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Mirk

on Monday March 29 2010, @10:07AM

Mirk writes "Every good programmer agrees on the need for simplicity, clarity and generality. But those are abstract qualities, and it's never been established what concrete properties of code make it simple to read, understand and modify. Books like Fowler's Refactoring advocate decomposition into many small classes, each with many tiny methods, but that approach brings problems of its own. Might it be better to retain fewer, larger methods? Or could it be that different people with different aptitudes prefer different approaches?

Discussion at Hacker News [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1224071] has been very provocative, and the author has responded with a followup [http://reprog.wordpress.com/2010/03/28/what-is-simplicity-in-programming-redux/]"
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Hacker, architect and superhero: three programmers-> 0

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Mirk

on Sunday March 21 2010, @08:45PM

Mirk writes "We all know programmers whose skills humble us, but software skills don't just fall on a linear scale of worst to best: good programming comes in many different and sometime incompatible flavors. This article looks at three individuals who excel in very different ways, and asks what the rest of us can learn from them. Which one are you?"
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Trying to "Say what you mean, simply and directly" 0

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Mirk

on Thursday March 18 2010, @06:22PM

Mirk writes "One of the first rules in Kerninghan and Pike's classic The Elements of Programming Style is "say what you mean, simply and directly", and this is one of the most universally applicable of all programming guidelines. The Reinvigorated Programmer argues that structure-rich languages like Java and C++ simply don't allow you to do this, that the scaffolding obscures the actual building, and that higher level languages such as Ruby allow code to be much shorter and more comprehensible."

Programming the Commodore 64: The Definitive Guide-> 0

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Mirk

on Saturday March 13 2010, @07:38AM

Mirk writes "Back in 1985 it was possible to understand the whole computer, from the hardware up through device drivers and the kernel through to the high-level language that came burned into the ROMs (even if it was only Microsoft BASIC). The Reinvigorated Programmer revisits R. C. West's classic and exhaustive book Programming the Commodore 64 and laments the decline of that sort of comprehensive Deep Knowing."
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A different take on functional programming-> 0

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Mirk

on Thursday March 11 2010, @01:56PM

Mirk writes "An imperative program tells you how to calculate a factorial, whereas a functional program just says what a factorial is. The Reinvigorated Programmer tries to get to grips with the alien world of functional programming, and wonders whether the real question is which approach scales better to realistic-sized problems?"
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Comment: Link in main post is no longer correct (Score 1) 2

by Mirk on Tuesday March 09 2010, @07:21PM (#31420840) Attached to: The value of BASIC as a first programming language

For some reason, Wordpress published this article as though it had been pushed two days ago. When I changed the release date to today, that changed the permalink, if you can imagine anything so dumb. So the link that I submitted is now broken -- D'oh! Please amend to: http://reprog.wordpress.com/2010/03/09/where-dijkstra-went-wrong-the-value-of-basic-as-a-first-programming-language/ Sorry about that.