Programming

The Web Directions - <a href="https://wdyk-melb-sept13.eventbrite.com/" target="_blank">What do you know events</a> are always a fun night and tonight was no exception with many running 'jokes' about some of the appalling policy decisions just announced by the coalition that will affect our industry, one which has been a boom area for Australia, but largely unrecognised on the larger national scale. Anyway, enough of Politics, what were the talks? Bear in mind there were 10, so this will be very brief...

Close the laptop and break out the dice...after you read this post about how board games can help ease your troubled dev mind.

Like many of my age and generation, I started learning to program with BASIC. These were the days when you bought magazines full of pages and pages of code for games or basic applications. You spent hours with your friends painstakingly typing these programs into a computer to find there was a typo, or the game didn’t work, and then giving up. It was more about hanging out with your friends, whilst your parents felt like you were learning something.

I recently read <https://www.bfilipek.com/2016/05/coding-without-google.html> about a Developer's workflow before the proliferation of the internet, search engines and developer websites. It reminded me of an idea I had wanted to write about for a while and this blog post prompted me to drag it off my todo list.

Python is a wonderful language, ideal for beginners, and easy to scale up from starter projects to complex applications for data processing and serving dynamic web pages. As you increase complexity in your applications, it can be easy to inadvertently introduce potential problems and vulnerabilities. In this article, I will highlight the easiest to miss that can cause the biggest problems, how to avoid them and tools and services that help you save time doing so.

I would never call myself a real programmer, but I have a healthy obsession with studying new languages that emerge, especially those that arrive with little baggage and attempt to solve current problems and new use cases. This brought about my explorations in recent years of Swift and Kotlin, both initially aimed to fix issues with the languages traditionally used in their worlds, but rapidly became used in more widespread contexts, and generally, have enthusiastic communities.

Read on to see what one DZone Zone Leader learned at the iTake conference, including new perspectives on testing, BDD, security, and mob programming.

Learning to code with a board game? Sounds too good to be true.

Swift Playgrounds from Apple is a slick integrated coding education tool — how far does go it to teach one of the hottest languages of the past 5 years?

Ruby’s creator, Yukihiro Matsumoto (Matz), released the first public version of the programming language in December 1995, making Ruby just shy of its 30th birthday. It spread across Japanese-language Usenet newsgroups, a popular way of exchanging conversation and media before the World Wide Web, and then reached broader communities throughout the late 1990s.

Have you ever tried programming with a language that uses musical notation? What about a language that never runs programs the same way? What about a language where you write code with photographs? All exist, among many others, in the world of esoteric programming languages, and Daniel Temkin has written a forthcoming book covering 44 of them, some of which exist and are usable to some interpretation of the word “usable.” The book, Forty-Four Esolangs: The Art of Esoteric Code, is out on 23 September, published by MIT Press.