Tagged by 'articles'

Binary File Format Compatibility

Source BigFoto.com

Most of the software applications I have worked on have demonstrated the following properties:

the application has a longevity far beyond the original forecast,
the binary file formats change dramatically over time,
these binary files can be shared between different versions of the same application,
more and more binary file handling code is developed to handle the different file formats,
sooner or later, applications break trying to read the various binary file versions.

This article proposes a method to prevent such breakages.

What (Programming) Languages?

Source BigFoto.com

This big unanswered question.

This is a common question on the Internet - what programming language should I learn? Unfortunately, it doesn't have a common answer. If you were asked what human language should I learn, you probably wouldn't give an immediate answer, because a lot depends on the person asking the question. Do they already know another language? Do they know their native language very well? What do they want to learn a language for - interest or work?

Beginner's JavaScript

Source BigFoto.com

This tutorial is for those of you who are thinking of trying out programming, and have little or no previous experience. I have chosen JavaScript since it is an easy language to understand, whilst being extremely powerful. Although you probably know of JavaScript because it is the de facto scripting language within HTML pages, I'm not going to use a browser. Instead I'll use an interpreter based on the SpiderMonkey scripting engine (the JavaScript implementation within Mozilla Firefox, among others), called JSDB. I'll use this interpreter to create the output to the 99 bottles of beer song.