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I think Alan Kay has some insight into programming. His suggestion is that programming is a Pop Culture, because it spreads much, much faster than education and formal study spreads. The programming language BASIC became popular because Dartmouth had it on a computer system, and General Electric franchised that system. Once it spread “in the wild,” it became popular because it was popular. Many things in programming are like that. Popularity rules, and fitness for purpose is secondary.
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Welcome to our continuing series of Code Project interviews. We talk to developers about their backgrounds, projects, interests and pet peeves.
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It gives us great pleasure to announce that today at //build/ we launched the Windows Phone 8 development story. We have enhanced the existing Visual Studio 2012 developer tools to support development of Windows Phone 8 apps optimized for a variety of resolutions and hardware, introduced ability to simulate and monitor the impact of real life conditions on app quality and also enabled native C++ app development. Here are all of the tools you'll need to start coding for Windows Phone 8.
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Today, we are happy to announce the availability of .NET for Windows Phone 8 and the Windows Phone SDK 8.0! We have made major updates to the .NET Framework runtime and code generation process that have resulted in startup time improvements as high as 50%. We have also included the new async programming model from .NET Framework 4.5 and the world-class garbage collector in the CoreCLR for better app responsiveness. Your customers will enjoy the big improvements that they see in your app running on Windows Phone 8. Here's a rundown of all the new .NET goodness for Windows Phone 8.
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In my consultant career, no matter the kind of company I visited, from the tiny startup to the largest fortune 500 corporation, they all have in common to be entangled in spaghetti. Spaghetti means poorly structured code. Spaghetti means high maintenance and evolution cost. Spaghetti means frustration, friction and lack of motivation for everyone in the team. And often, spaghetti means project failure. Mastering code structure means demystifying and getting rid of spaghetti code!
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It turns out that the optimal encoding strategy is arithmetic coding. For those who don’t already recognize it, this turns out to be a Huffman encoding tree. Huffman coding is really just a special case of arithmetic coding. But before jumping into that, let’s first take a look at an alternate encoding strategy which requires a bit more memory than we’re allowed, but is much easier to understand. This alternate coding also has a few similarities to the arithmetic coding implementation I wrote, so it’ll serve as a pretty good warm-up to that one. Now let's try it in 640k.
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We live in the as-a era. IaaS, SaaS, PaaS. Even Database-as-a-Service where companies offer SQL and NoSQL database management systems hosted online. We played with the concept a bit, and, in an era which is also the one of cloud storage with Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, Skydrive and the like, we wondered why applications and services shouldn't just use our cloud storage account to store our data. Why everything should be centralized? Why all applications and services behave like Mega and not like BitTorrent? That why we introduced in Opa 1.0.7 a new database back-end working on top of Dropbox. Home is where your CRUD is.
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Interesting. .
Wonde Tadesse
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Quote: the former head of IBM's OS/2 project is the owner
I noticed that the only comments on the article to support the SurfCast trolls are by "lostviking".
"Lost Viking" was an old OS/2 game.
Coincidence?
I think not!
- Life in the fast lane is only fun if you live in a country with no speed limits.
- Of all the things I have lost, it is my mind that I miss the most.
- I vaguely remember having a good memory...
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All these lawsuits make me sick 
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That just screams 'Patent Troll!'
Just like SCO.
And that 'lostviking' guy may be working for that 'company's' (I use the term loosely here) 'Troll Department'.
I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image.
Stephen Hawking
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Isn't Windows 3.1 an example of prior art? 
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Damages for what?? Who on thsi planet has ever heard of Surfcast??
Has anyone seen their website?? it looks like it was thrown together for the very purpose of showing "Hey, we have these patents!" and nothing else. No products, no nothing...
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Dave Kreskowiak wrote: Damages for what??
For the multi-gigabuck licensing fee MS didn't pay them before WP7 launched. 
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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Most people who have been assigned the unfortunate task of managing programmers have no idea how to motivate them. They believe that the small perks (such as foosball tables) and bonuses that work in more relaxed settings will compensate for more severe hindrances like distracting work environments, low autonomy, poor tools, unreasonable deadlines, and pointless projects. They’re wrong. We value interesting work, so give it to us and get out of the way.
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It's true. Every company that I worked for has similar issue.
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This is my comment that I posted on that blog:
“Career Development” is a codeword for buying the latest in software and/or tools. This is exactly why and how crappy products such as the SAP or Oracle ERP products have achieved market dominance.
Programmers feel they need to get on the latest bandwagon so that they are able to jump ships at a momemt’s notice. They want their employers to train them for their next job opportunity outside the company.
I will give you one example.
In 2003, I asked someone I knew what kind of technologies his employer was using. It turned out it was an IBM mainframe and the applications were written in COBOL and used VSAM files. There was not even the IMS database in sight, let alone a Relational DBMS.
How many of you would want to work in that environment?
By the way, that company has been in the consumer loan business for ages. Their business model hasn’t changed and so programs written in the 1970s were perfectly fine for them.
Would you work there maintaining their applications? Or, would you advise them to move to Unix, C, Oracle/SQLServer DBMS, etc.?
PS for Codeproject. Application maintenance and enhancement had been outsourced to an Indian software/contract-programming company by the consumer loan company. Can you give a reason why that was done?
modified 31-Oct-12 21:01pm.
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Let me add to my previous comment.
There is this Coder Interview with Mark Rendle. I assume coder interviews are with programmers who somehow manage to attract the attention of the coding community and Codeproject.
Verbatim from that interview:
What new tools, languages or frameworks interest you?
All of them! I suffer from neophilic attention-deficit disorder. I really have a problem resisting the urge to try and learn everything at once, but I try to keep it down to one or two things at a time.
Right now I’m focusing on JavaScript, which is not new, but is definitely having a renaissance. There’s Node.js, of course, and some really exciting things happening in browser app development with frameworks like Knockout and Angular. I also prefer using HTML and JavaScript for the UI code for Windows 8 apps, although I still do the other bits (business logic, data access and so on) in C#.
Languages I’m interested in but not letting myself play with right now include Rust, Clojure, Go, Dart, Nemerle and C++11 (which has got so many new features it’s practically a new language).
Mark Rendle says he does, among other things, "consulting with a company looking to bring a big enterprise system up to date".
WWMRD when he is asked for advice by that consumer loan company which uses COBOL on an IBM mainframe that I mentioned in my previous post?
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A good friend works in the insurance industry and we've discussed the ins and outs of updating old systems and business practices. It's actually very interesting stuff.
Typically, if the old systems work, they don't mess with them. There are still COBOL and FORTRAN guys out there who love the stuff and take pride in keeping these old systems going. Seriously. You should see the condescending email I get when I poke fun at their beloved old languages. Good on them.
Maybe over the years new services or data stores were built using whatever technology was right at the time. Business doesn't stand still. So then you've got to stitch those new bits and layers together.
The old systems maybe aren't so easy or fun for people to interact with easily. So more modern languages and frameworks are used to update the systems with capabilities and interfaces that suit today's business better. A few years ago that might have been a Windows app. More recently an internal web interface. Now maybe a secure, public, self-service site or mobile app.
The back end doesn't necessarily get rebuilt, but the ways they get used and accessed do get updated over time, and I think that's where new technologies come into play. Sure, the old FORTRAN-based system works, but would you build new capabilities today with FORTRAN?
Also, people who enjoy what they do often enjoy learning new things about what they do and what's happening in their profession. It's called keeping up to date and staying sharp with new challenges. A real expert might know about all sorts of the latest tools, but would presumably recommend the solution most appropriate to the problem.
In other word, learning about "Rust, Clojure, Go, Dart, Nemerle and C++11" doesn't necessarily mean using them indiscriminately.
Director of Content Development, The Code Project
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You've probably seen Jeff Blankenburg's "31 Days..." article series before, covering Silverlight, Windows Phone and more. This time Jeff is teaming up with Clark Sells to bring you 31 Days of Windows 8. Watch this space for details, resources and more. 'Tis the season for mobile coding.
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I’ve been using Windows Phone 8 for a while now. Here are a few of my favorite features that didn’t get announced yesterday. One user shares his favorite unsung WP8 features.
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Not sure why this was univoted. Countered.
I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image.
Stephen Hawking
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"This site is currently not available..."
Looks like Azure doesn't like WP8.
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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