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One of my coworkers sent this Kotaku article by game developer Shawn McGrath to our internal code readers mailing list. It’s a review of the Doom III source code, describing the beautiful coding style of Id Software founder John Carmack, one of the programmers who I most respect. It’s a thoughtful article about thoughtfully written code, and really shows the value of reading code for the practicing programmer. One of my favorite things about John Carmack is that he has always been more of a craftsman than a theoretician when it comes to developing software. To get an idea of what I mean, take a look at his blog post on functional programming in C++, which he linked to in his comment on the Kotaku article. Carmack’s post is a far better introduction to the benefits of functional programming than the one I linked to the other day. ...

One less remarked upon contribution Aaron Swartz made as an engineer was his 2006 post Who Writes Wikipedia? Having heard that around 500 editors made over 50% of the edits to Wikipedia from Jimmy Wales, Aaron performed his own analysis and found that while a core group of editors made most of the edits, a much larger group of people did most of the actual writing. In the days before it was common for every site to perform quantitative analysis user activity and publish the results, Aaron embarked on what was for its day a Big Data project, and published a surprising and interesting result that vastly changed people’s understanding of Wikipedia. This is the sort of work everyone in analytics aspires to do. ...

Add Aaron Swartz to the list of people I wish I’d met before it was too late. Cory Doctorow has written a great remembrance. When I was younger, I was obsessed with this famous George Bernard Shaw quote: The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. I never really lived it, though. Aaron Swartz did. The world never treats those people especially well. ...

Here are a few things that have caught my eye lately from the world of Big Data and analytics. Back in September, I explained why Web developers should care about analytics. This week I noticed a job opening for a Web developer at Grist that includes knowledge of analytics in the list of requirements. That doesn’t exactly make for a trend, but I expect to see a lot more of this going forward. ...

I’ve been living in Vim for the past year or so, and doing so has yielded great rewards in terms of productivity and one decent post on the grammar of Vim. I’ve tried to be miserly with Vim plugins. There are tons of great plugins for Vim, but I feel like it’s more important to master the built in features of the editor before I start adding new ones. For example, I’m still not a proficient user of registers, and I still miss opportunities to perform operations using the inside and around grammar. ...

John D. Cook blogs a great quotation from G. K. Chesterton that advises caution before removing something. In essence, he challenges people who would remove something unnecessary to go and figure out why it was erected in the first place. Needless to say, this is an issue we deal with a lot in writing software. In the comments of the post, an interesting debate plays out about the role of code, automated tests, and documentation in helping people figure out why the code that they want to delete was originally written. ...

Yesterday I linked to Uncle Bob’s intro to functional programming. There are some interesting reactions floating around today. Tim Bray agrees that FP is important, but doesn’t like the magical example or the fact that it’s written in Lisp. The reliably cranky Cédric Beust pushes back on the article with vigor, mainly on the point that functional programming is the “next big thing” in software engineering. For what it’s worth, I think that functional programming is worth learning more about because it will make you a better programmer in whatever language you use, not because one day you’ll be using FP and abandoning the use of mutable variables. ...

I fully intend to write a post talking about stuff I learned in 2012, but in truth, I’ll probably never get around to it. The blog suffered last year because I was so busy stuffing new stuff into my head that I didn’t have the energy to write much of it down. One of the big things I learned was that while I’ve programmed in a lot of languages, they all came from the same family and I used them all in the same way. That left a huge gaping hole in my experience called “functional programming.” There’s another hole involving functions as first class objects that I’m trying to fill up as well. ...

I was reading Andrew Sullivan’s announcement that he is going independent and starting his own company to publish his blog, and what interested me most is the employee list. He has editors and interns, and that’s it. No designer. No engineers. My understanding is that his blog has been published using Movable Type forever, and probably will continue to be published using Movable Type. Maybe that’s incorrect, but I assume it’s some canned publishing tool. He’s going to be using TinyPass to collect subscription fees, and there won’t be any advertising so he doesn’t need advertising technology. ...

Every once in awhile, the server this blog runs on chews up all of its RAM and swap space and becomes unresponsive, forcing a hard reboot. The problem is always the same – too many Apache workers running at the same time. It happened this morning and there were well over 50 Apache workers running, each consuming about 15 megs of RAM apiece. The server (a virtual machine provided by Linode) has 512 megs of RAM, so Apache is consuming all of the VM’s memory on its own. ...