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The Olive Garden: it's where poor people go to eat rich people food. — Dave Yegge This is another one of those blog topics I've been sitting on for way too long, trying to find a polite way of saying something fundamentally impolite. I don't see a way to do it. So: you stand a good chance of being offended by this blog entry. (Hey, just don't say I didn't warn ya.) I've turned off blog comments, i

This idea that there is generality in the specific is of far-reaching importance. — Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach Note: Today's entry is a technical article: it isn't funny. At least not intentionally. Update, Oct 20th 2008: I've added an Updates section, where I'll try to track significant responses, at least for a week or so. There are three entries so far. Contents Introduction Three

I will once again plagiarize myself by transcribing a talk I gave. First: be warned! I offer this gesture of respect to you — yes, you! — when I say that this is at least 20 minutes of reading. This is long even for me. If you're surfing reddit, gobbling up little information snacks, then it's best to think of this entry as being more like a big downer cow. Unless you're really hungry, you should

Some guys at Stanford invited me to speak at their EE Computer Systems Colloquium last week. Pretty cool, eh? It was quite an honor. I wound up giving a talk on dynamic languages: the tools, the performance, the history, the religion, everything. It was a lot of fun, and it went over surprisingly well, all things considered. They've uploaded the video of my talk, but since it's a full hour, I figu

And you thought I'd given up on controversial blogs. Hah! Preamble This must be said: Jamie Zawinski is a hero. A living legend. A major powerhouse programmer who, among his many other accomplishments, wrote the original Netscape Navigator and the original XEmacs. A guy who can use the term "downward funargs" and then glare at you just daring you to ask him to explain it, you cretin. A dude with a

I've been meaning to write up some tips on interviewing at Google for a good long time now. I keep putting it off, though, because it's going to make you mad. Probably. For some statistical definition of "you", it's very likely to upset you. Why? Because... well, here, I wrote a little ditty about it: Hey man, I don't know that stuff Stevey's talking aboooooout If my boss thinks it's important I'm

Are you an Emacs user but don't know Lisp? Welcome to my first Emacs Lisp primer! This should hopefully help get you over the hurdle so you can have more control over your Emacs sessions. There are lots of ways to do things in Lisp, and some are "Lispier" than others. I'm going to focus on how to do things you probably already know how to do from C++ or Java. I'm mostly focusing on the language it

But seriously, I didn't mean to insult your favorite language… much.  After all, your language of choice is probably getting better at a glacial pace.  Right?  If your language isn't dead, then it's gradually getting better as they release updates to it. How slowly, though?  Well... If the language you're using happens to be Java, then you've no doubt realized that by the time Java becomes a reall

Objective: Obtain a position at IBM -- some idiot applying to Amazon.com WARNING: These are my own *personal* opinions, not Google's or Amazon's or anyone else's. I do think you'll find that most resume screeners at tech companies — particularly tech companies that build their own software in-house, like Yahoo! or eBay or Amazon.com or Microsoft or Google — will agree with a lot of this stuff, on

I finally upgraded to Emacs 22 a few weeks ago, and now I'm wishing I'd braved it sooner. Technically it's not released yet; I'm working from a build of a cvs snapshot from a month or so ago. But the Emacs dev team works pretty hard to make sure it has problem-free builds on a whole slew of platforms, so just following their instructions has a pretty good chance of working for you. It's worth the

They've a temper, some of them—particularly verbs: they're the proudest—adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs—however, I can manage the whole lot of them! Impenetrability! That's what I say! — Humpty Dumpty Hello, world! Today we're going to hear the story of Evil King Java and his quest for worldwide verb stamp-outage.1 Caution: This story does not have a happy ending. It is neither

It's been over four months since Eric Kidd posted his infamous Why Ruby is an acceptable LISP article. You know, the one that got approximately 6.02e23 comments, ranging from "I agree!" through "I hate you!" to "I bred them together to create a monster!" Any time the comment thread becomes huge enough to exhibit emergent behavior, up to and including spawning new species of monsters, you know you'

I've been working for the past 15 months on repairing my rusty math skills, ever since I read a biography of Johnny von Neumann. I've read a huge stack of math books, and I have an even bigger stack of unread math books. And it's starting to come together. Let me tell you about it. Conventional Wisdom Doesn't Add Up First: programmers don't think they need to know math. I hear that so often; I har