Viewing profile — ericssmith

You should try skimming to the end, where there are two pages of references. Not to mention the fact that Cardelli is a prominent figure in the study of programming languages. And …

That conclusion made me laugh. In the early to mid 90s, I was working on 3D interactive software. The video drivers and chips had advanced so much in one year that all of the lovin…

Although the OP seems to be asking for "engineering" not "programming" books, I'm going to second this. Benjamin Pierce's "Types and Programming Languages" will help you get down t…

As a long-time advocate of functional programming, I was once asked after a talk what is the "best" FP language to learn. Since I'm known as a Haskell/Scala/ML person, I surprised …

He keeps warning not to write thousands of lines before talking to customers (as you often hear from biased survivors). But it sounds like they didn't find PM fit by talking to cus…

Speaking from personal experience ... At the time of signing you can see the upside (the offer), but you can't know the downside, which can be quite significant. It's a poor trade-…

Kay mentions The Dream Machine, which in my opinion is one of the better books on some of the early work in computing systems. Heartily recommend it. http://amzn.to/2r5cf0h

"Je n’avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là." -- Pierre-Simon Laplace

Here is an essay I wrote following my son's first technical talk, weeks after his seventh birthday. It references what I believe works in teaching children to program. https://medi…

Not at all high-brow, but I revisit the in-the-trenches case study of "Scaling Pinterest" on Infoq from time to time because I find their fighting through the pain inspirational fo…

Absolutely! Every time programming education comes up, someone brings up Scratch. It's advocacy is -- possibly detrimentally -- overused. It may be appropriate in some cases, but i…

I was delighted to see most of the answers here encourage you to continue from where you are in your interests. Only one comment mentioned abandoning your love and going to where e…

I was delighted to see most of the answers here encourage you to continue from where you are in your interests. Only one comment mentioned abandoning your love and going to where e…

The headline and the body are posing two different questions. Regarding books that impacted my career in software. The top three are: 1) K&R C 2) Zen of Graphics Programming 3) C++…

This morning, I saw yet another intro to programming using a blocks UI this morning. This one was particularly upsetting because it didn't even contain any concepts of "coding" tha…

I teach my 6yo son using Pyret and Racket simultaneously. Pyret is, hands down, the best teaching language today, but hasn't been in use as long as Racket, so there aren't as many …

I would suggest that the need for Englishy variable names is due to a weakness in programming languages and possibly the programming model itself. Why should a set of legitimate va…

Sure. The original 1931 paper is 20-something pages long: http://www.w-k-essler.de/pdfs/goedel.pdf Here's an English translation (with a lengthy introduction) http://jacqkrol.x10.m…

Although it's nice to see Gödel show up in the popular press, I didn't get what the point of this was. His Incompleteness paper is not that impenetrable. Sometimes it does pay to a…

Never reassign a variable with a different value.

I recently gave an intro to coding to young Girl Scouts using Pyret ( http://www.pyret.org ). The screencast is here: https://vimeo.com/163949506 I had to wing it because the ages …

Elizabeth Warren makes similar observations in presentation at UC Berkeley in 2007 http://www.uctv.tv/shows/The-Coming-Collapse-of-the-Middle-C...