A teaching story

The craft of programming is not a thing easily taught. It’s not so much that the low level details like language syntaxes are difficult to convey, it’s more that (as I’ve written before) “the way of the hacker is a posture of mind”. The posture of mind is more essential than the details. I only… Continue reading A teaching story

Open Adventure 1.1, and some thoughts on software preservation

Open Adventure 1.1 has shipped. There are a lot more changes under the hood than are readily apparent. In fact there have been no changes in gameplay at all, and only minor changes to the UI (reversible with the -o oldstyle switch). We (Jason Ninneman, Per Vorpaev, Aaron Traas, Peje Nilsson and I) could have… Continue reading Open Adventure 1.1, and some thoughts on software preservation

The Adventure begins again

Colossal Cave Adventure was the origin of many things; the text adventure game, the dungeon-crawling D&D (computer) game, the MOO, the roguelike genre. Computer gaming as we know it would not exist without ADVENT (as it was known in its original PDP-10 incarnation).

The advent of ADVENT

A marvellous thing has just occurred. Colossal Cave Adventure, the original progenitor of the D&D-like dungeon-crawling game genre from 1977 and fondly remembered as ADVENT by those of us who played it on PDP-10s, is one of the major artifacts of hacker history. The earliest version by Crowther and Woods (sometimes known as 350-point Adenture)… Continue reading The advent of ADVENT

src 1.13 is released

My exercise in how small you can make a version-control system and still have it be useful, src, does seem to have a significant if quiet fanbase out there. I can tell because patches land in my mailbox at a slow but steady rate. As the blurb says: Simple Revision Control is RCS/SCCS reloaded with… Continue reading src 1.13 is released

Reposturgeon recruits the CryptBitKeeper!

I haven’t announced a reposurgeon release on the blog in some time because recent releases have mostly been routine stuff and bugfixes. But today we have a feature that many will find interesting: reposurgeon can now read BitKeeper repositories. This is its first new version-control system since Monotone was added in mid-2015.

loccount: A faster SLOC utility

Here’s my first new project in a while – loccount, inspired by David A. Wheeler’s sloccount tool but much faster and with broader language coverage. I actually wrote this as a learning exercise in the Go language. You can find more details in my NTPsec blog post on Grappling With Go. If you like it,… Continue reading loccount: A faster SLOC utility

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Twenty years after

I just shipped what was probably the silliest and most pointless software release of my career. But hey, it’s the reference implementation of a language and I’m funny that way. Because I write compilers for fun, I have a standing offer out to reimplement any weird old language for which I am sent a sufficiently… Continue reading Twenty years after

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Some aphorisms on software development methodology

The net benefit of having anything that can be called a software development methodology is in inverse proportion to the quality of your developers – and possibly inverse-squared. Any software-development methodology works well on sufficiently small projects, but all scale very badly to large ones. The good ones scale slightly less badly. One thing all… Continue reading Some aphorisms on software development methodology

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