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  1. 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 …

  2. 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 …
  3. 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 …

  4. 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 …

  5. 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 …

  6. Net Neutrality: forcing companies to pay attention to their networks

    When it comes to software licensing, I get annoyed at GPL critics. Mostly they argue that a permissive license is more hassle-free. But all licensing hassles come from proprietary licenses. All of them. Open source licenses are simple, well-understood, and if you are doing open source stuff you don’t …

  7. Surveillance, Security, Privacy, Politics

    I hang around people who talk about security and privacy and activists quite a bit. When talking security beyond the typical attackers — people committing identity theft, simple vandals, spammers, etc. — there’s the topic of government surveillance and legal attacks, and privacy as a way to defend political activists against …

  8. The Browser Desktop, developer tools

    I find myself working in a Windows environment due to some temporary problems with my Linux installation. In terms of user experience Windows is not terrible. But more notable, things mostly just feel the same. My computing experience is not very dependent on the operating system… almost. Most of what …

  9. Silver Lining: More People!

    OK… so I said before Silver Lining is for collaborators not users. And that’s still true… it’s not a polished experience where you can confidently ignore the innards of the tool. But it does stuff, and it works, and you can use it. So… I encourage some more …

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