The Tyranny of Existing Code

When I last visited my parents, my mom and dad asked me whether I was worried about ChatGPT or other AI systems taking away programmers’ jobs and whether I was worried about my own future. My answer to them—and this might be a naïve take—is that I’m not very worried and that I think that programmers are going to be around for a while yet. The...

A discussion between Jonathan Blow and Casey Muratori on the handling of precedence in Jon’s compiler recently popped in my YouTube feed. The discussion is three hours and focuses on implementing operator precedence more easily and more simply in Jai using Pratt parsing. Jon and Casey also talk about the previous implementation of operator...

When Hare was announced back in 2022, I saw the post on Hacker News, went to the website, looked at the documentation, and my reaction was a lukewarm “meh”. Hare was a new entry in what I call the “Modern Cs”: languages that use C as their base inspiration and try to improve upon C by adding new features, removing some footguns, and polishing...

In the talk Solving the Right Problems for Engine Programmers, Mike Acton spends a section of his talk on what he considers the three fundamental areas in which most programmers are incompetent: practice, reasonable defaults, problem solving skills. The first one in particular is quite interesting, because it enables the two others: someone who...

How hard is it to get Minecraft for a game console? If you’re an adult you drive to your favorite video game store, buy Minecraft, pop the cartridge in the console, and play. If you’re a kid, your experience is similar, it has one extra step: you nag your parents for a while to get the game, they drive to the store, buy it, you pop the cartridge...