mdhughes

71 karma · joined September 9, 2011

iPhone, web, and indie game developer.

mdhugheson Ask HN: Which programmer do you look up to?

Jon Bentley, author of Programming Pearls, which is the clearest explanation of solving the actual problem needed; when I say "software engineering", PP is what I mean.

William Kent, author of Data & Reality https://mdhughes.tech/2017/07/19/data-and-reality-william-ke...

Kent Beck, author of Extreme Programming Explained, for making good engineering practices "go to 11".

mdhugheson Command line interfaces are reified UIs

You can copy and paste in a CLI as well. I often chain pbcopy/pbpaste (OS X, I used similar but differently-named commands on Linux) into scripts rather than temp files or input files. And ultimately, that's what a pasteboard is: a temp file, as used by CLIs for ~70 years.

mdhugheson Ask HN: How do I find people to follow on Mastodon?

Look at the Federated timeline, and find people you like there. If there's a bunch from one instance, consider moving to that instance, and then you can read a local timeline of like-minded people. mastodon.social is sort of the newbie instance, and its local timeline is noisy and unfocused.

mdhugheson Why I use Object Pascal

Haven't tried it yet, once I get desktop tech demo stable (hopefully this month, barring work & laziness) and can see it run on non-Macs, mobile's the next target.

No idea how I'll test Android, I'm a Mac and iOS guy, and years ago when I tried the Android IDE the emulator was appalling.

mdhugheson Why I use Object Pascal

Namespaces by 2020? That'd be nice. The \ syntax still makes my eyes bleed a bit, when most others use . or :

mdhugheson Why I use Object Pascal

There are only a few "popular" languages that have both, many that don't; those are not mandatory features for everyone.

I care about performance (ruling out any GC language), multi-platform native binaries, language readability, dev community, and a bundle of other factors. Pascal turns out to hit most of my needs and not annoy me too much.

Of the thousands of more obscure languages, I'm sure there's one that'd be perfect, except I'd have a worse time with libraries.

mdhugheson Why I use Object Pascal

C has no classes, and everything's in one global namespace.

Scheme & LISP have no built-in classes, and one can argue that CLOS isn't what we normally describe as OOP. Both normally have a global namespace.

Inheritance in JavaScript is possible but very hard to implement correctly before ES6. Node has namespaces (sort of) but client-side JavaScript generally doesn't.

PHP in theory has namespaces, but the standard libraries are just dumped in global.

mdhugheson Why I use Object Pascal

I've lately been trying out FreePascal for building my indie games (which have in the past been in C, Python, Java, Objective-C, and finally JavaScript), and it's going well enough. There's certainly room for improvement, and the Lazarus IDE is not at all to my taste, but it's likely to be my next-ten-years language.

https://mdhughes.tech/2017/09/02/pascal/

and a couple of followup posts

https://mdhughes.tech/category/pascal/

mdhugheson Simple note taking from the command line

Well, I got nerd-sniped by this, since lately I've been dumping text in Apple Notes which isn't really suitable for everything.

http://markdamonhughes.com/thoughtpy/

Kindly email me bugs, not pull requests.

mdhugheson Ask HN: What is your favorite CS paper?

Worse is Better http://wiki.c2.com/?WorseIsBetter

mdhugheson Java's Comb-Over

Age and complexity had absolutely nothing to do with why Java didn't get closures in Java 6 or 7. It's purely political.