I always intended "Programming in the 21st Century" to have a limited run. I knew since the entry from January 1, 2010, that I needed to end it. It just took a while.Recovering Programmer And now, an explanation. I started this blog to talk about issues tangentially related to programming, about soft topics like creativity and inspiration and how code is a medium for implementing creative visions. Instead I worked through more technical topics that I'd been kicking around over the years. That was fun! is something I would have loved to read in 1998. More than once I've googled around and ended up back at one of my essays.Purely Functional Retrogames As I started shifting gears and getting back toward what I originally wanted to do, there was one thing that kept bothering me: the word in the title.programming I don't think of myself as a programmer. I write code, and I often enjoy it when I do, but that term is both limiting and distracting. I don't want to program for its own sake, not being interested in the overall experience of what I'm creating. If I start thinking too much about programming as a distinct entity then I lose sight of that. Now that I've exhausted what I wanted to write about, I can clear those topics out of my head and focus more on using technology to make fun things.programmer Thanks for reading! It's hard to sum up 200+ articles, but here's a start. This is not even close to a full index. See the if you want everything. (There are some bits in there.)archivesodd Also see the for all of the functional programming articles.previous entry is something I wrote in 2004 which used to be linked from every prog21 entry.Programming as if Performance Mattered widely linked popular on creativity others that I like Erlang retro Things That Turbo Pascal is Smaller Than Do You Really Want to be Doing This When You're 50? Organizational Skills Beat Algorithmic Wizardry Retiring Python as a Teaching Language Computer Science Courses that Don't Exist, But Should Five Memorable Books About Programming A Spellchecker Used to Be a Major Feat of Software Engineering Want to Write a Compiler? Just Read These Two Papers. On Being Sufficiently Smart Optimizing for Fan Noise Free Your Technical Aesthetic from the 1970s Advice to Aimless, Excited Programmers Write Code Like You Just Learned How to Program Don't Distract New Programmers with OOP Recovering From a Computer Science Education Don't Fall in Love With Your Technology A Complete Understanding is No Longer Possible Solving the Wrong Problem This is Why You Spent All that Time Learning to Program We Who Value Simplicity Have Built Incomprehensible Machines Your Coding Philosophies are Irrelevant The Silent Majority of Experts Hopefully More Controversial Programming Opinions How much memory does malloc(0) allocate? The Pure Tech Side is the Dark Side Flickr as a Business Simulator How to Think Like a Pioneer What Do People Like? Accidental Innovation, Part 1 If You're Not Gonna Use It, Why Are You Building It? It's Like That Because It Has Always Been Like That Trapped by Exposure to Pre-Existing Ideas Get Good at Idea Generation You Can't Sit on the Sidelines and Become a Philosopher The Software Developer's Sketchbook Design is Expensive Why Doesn't Creativity Matter in Tech Recruiting? Deriving Forth Tales of a Former Disassembly Addict Living Inside Your Own Black Box Tricky When You Least Expect It The Most Important Decisions are Non-Technical Things to Optimize Besides Speed and Memory All that Stand Between You and a Successful Project are 500 Experiments The UNIX Philosophy and a Fear of Pixels Dangling by a Trivial Feature Documenting the Undocumentable You Don't Want to Think Like a Programmer You Don't Read Code, You Explore It If You Haven't Done It Before, All Bets Are Off What Can You Put in a Refrigerator? The Same User Interface Mistakes Over and Over Fun vs. Computer Science A Deeper Look at Tail Recursion in Erlang My Road to Erlang Garbage Collection in Erlang How to Crash Erlang Eleven Years of Erlang A Ramble Through Erlang IO Lists A Concurrent Language for Non-Concurrent Software A Peek Inside the Erlang Compiler Evolution of an Erlang Style A Personal History of Compilation Speed Slow Languages Battle Across Time How Much Processing Power Does it Take to be Fast? 8-Bit Scheme: A Revisionist History Stumbling Into the Cold Expanse of Real Programming Why Do Dedicated Game Consoles Exist? Lost Lessons from 8-Bit BASIC Programming Modern Systems Like It Was 1984

When I started this blog in 2007, a running theme was "Can interactive experiences like video games be written in a functional style?" These are programs heavily based around mutable state. They evolve, often drastically, during development, so there isn't a perfect up-front design to architect around. These were issues curiously avoided by the functional programming proponents of the 1980s and 1990s. It's still not given much attention in 2016 in either. I regularly see excited tutorials about mapping and folding and closures and immutable variables, and even JavaScript has these things now, but there's a next step that's rarely discussed and much more difficult: how to keep the benefits of immutability in large and messy programs that could gain the most from functional solutions--like video games. Before getting to that, here are the more skeptical functional programming articles I wrote, so it doesn't look like I'm a raving advocate: I took a straightforward, arguably naive, approach to interactive functional programs: no monads (because I didn't understand them), no functional-reactive programming (ditto, plus all implementations had severe performance problems), and instead worked with the basic toolkit of function calls and immutable data structures. It's completely possible to write a video game (mostly) in that style, but it's not a commonly taught methodology. "Purely Functional Retrogames" has most of the key lessons, but I added some additional techniques later: The bulk of my experience came from rewriting a 60fps 2D shooter in mostly-pure Erlang. I wrote about it in , but there's not much detail. It really needed to be a multi-part series with actual code.An Outrageous Port For completeness, here are the other articles that directly discuss FP: If I find any I missed, I'll add them. Admitting that Functional Programming Can Be Awkward Back to the Basics of Functional Programming Functional Programming Went Mainstream Years Ago Puzzle Languages Let's Take a Trivial Problem and Make it Hard Functional Programming Doesn't Work (and what to do about it) (4 parts)Purely Functional Retrogames Turning Your Code Inside Out A Worst Case for Functional Programming? Messy Structs/Classes in a Functional Style Reconsidering Functional Programming Functional Programming Archaeology Accidentally Introducing Side Effects into Purely Functional Code Explaining Functional Programming to Eight-Year-Olds Erlang vs. Unintentionally Purely Functional Python Starting in the Middle You, Too, Can Be on the Cutting Edge of Functional Programming Research Tips for Writing Functional Programming Tutorials Purely Functional Photoshop