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  1. Saying Goodbye To Python

    This post is long overdue; this isn’t a declaration of intent (any intent was long ago made real), just my reflection about my own path. I left the Python world a long time ago but I never took a chance to say goodbye.

    While I had moved on from …

  2. Live Programming, Walkabout.js

    There’s a number of “live programming” environments used for education. Khan Academy is one example. In it, you write code on the left hand side, and you immediately see the result on the right hand side. You don’t hit “save” or “run” — it’s just always running.

    There …

  3. Why Isn’t Programming Futuristic

    If you think someone is asking a rhetorical question, it is usually most interesting to treat it as though it is a legitimate question. Especially if we’re talking about something hard — driving down to underlying assumptions through this questioning process is interesting.

    Applying this to Bret Victor’s talk …

  4. The overuse of functions

    A programming quandry (related to some thoughts I’ve had on locality):

    The prevailing wisdom says that you should keep your functions small and concise, refactoring and extracting functions as necessary. But this hurts the locality of expectations that I have been thinking about. Consider:

    function updateUserStatus(user) {
      if (user …
  5. new” Only Makes Javascript OO Harder

    Javascript objects and classes aren’t hard. This whole “prototype” thing is blamed for too much: prototype-based programming isn’t hard. this is really weird, but prototypes aren’t.

    What’s prototype-based programming? It just means every object has a “prototype” and when you look up a property on the …

  6. New Blog Software

    Since I want to start blogging again, of course I have to also change my software. That’s just out these things work.

    And to start a new blog I need at least one post, otherwise things are breaky. So of course the first post must be the announcement I …

  7. Doctest.js & Callbacks

    Many years ago I wrote a fairly straight-forward port of Python’s doctest to Javascript. I thought it was cool, but I didn’t really talk about it that much. Especially because I knew it had one fatal flaw: it was very unfriendly towards programming with callbacks, and Javascript uses …

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This is the personal site of Ian Bicking. The opinions expressed here are my own.