I work for a big games company as a senior programmer, and I’m a regular on the interview loop. While I’d love to hire candidates who are smart and get things done, the reality of the situation is that more often than not I also have to hire candidates with…
Category: Programming
Lisping towards enlightenment
Me: a C/C++ programmer of 12 years (professionally), a Lisp dabbler (programmer is too strong a word to use here) of, let’s say ~3 months. I’ve done enough functional stuff to be comfortable with that side, but I haven’t (hadn’t) yet written a project big enough to get me used…
Six languages worth knowing
“A language that doesn’t affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing” – Alan Perlis. I’ve thought about this, and developed a short list of languages worth knowing. Not-so-coincidentally, each language in my list embodies a distinct computational model. In no particular order: The ALGOL family. C…
Webular lisp
I’ve decided to pick up the reins of lisp again and see if I can’t make some lispy web goodness. So to that end, I installed apache2, mod_lisp2, and did an asdf-install of cl-modlisp tonight. It seems to be correctly installed: next step is to go back to Practical Common…
Books I keep at work
The working bookshelf of a games programmer.
Exploring Pascal’s Triangle
Pascal’s Triangle (henceforth known as PT). You know – that thing you learned in maths. The Wikipedia entry, like most mathematical Wikipedia entries, reads (if your mathematical background is anything like mine) like “here’s a few things you might vaguely remember from school, oh and of course gleep = glorp”….
Concurrency in games
I’ve been programming next-gen consoles for a while now, and I have to say: it’s not getting any easier to write games to take advantage of multi-core systems. The conventional wisdom at my company is: writing multithreaded code is hard, so “ordinary programmers” should not be doing it – let’s…
The Camel Has Two Humps
I’ve just been reading an interesting paper on teaching programming. First, the data regarding rates of attrition on computing courses is startling. Between 30% and 60% of the total CS intake fails the very first programming course! The paper’s authors postulate 3 programming hurdles to be negotiated: sequencing and assignment…
RotateAVI updated
The latest version has a minor update. Nothing functional, just a display thing. But every little thing makes it a bit easier to use. Rotate AVI files from your digital camera easily!
fighting the code
Why doesn’t automake/autoconf properly recognise the way to use Flex/Bison with C++ scanner/parser generation? I use a .ll file and it thinks the output is going to be a .c instead of a .cc. Likewise I use a .yy file and it screws up the includes in my bison output…