Learning to COPE

Scott M. Fulton, III interviews Daniel Jacobson in support of Dan's new O'Reilly book APIs: A Strategy Guide, co-authored with Greg Brail and Dan Wood.

Had we but money enough and time

Plan 28, brainchild of John Graham-Cumming and Doron Swade, and with the cooperation of London's Science Museum and the Computer Conservation Society, has begun the process of building Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine. Once Babbage's plans are digitized, the first big task is to figure out which of his (incomplete) designs to build.

No vanilla, just chocolate

I am sure that one of my upcoming projects can find a use for this: Matthew DeLambo introduces ICE, a plugin for TinyMCE and WordPress that tracks changes. The post also mentions the DOM Range feature, which also might have helped us out on some previous work.

Good advice

Two related links via The Code Project: Jennifer Lindner interviews two instructors from Girl Develop It, which offers workshops in HTML/CSS, JavaScript/jQuery, Ruby on Rails, and other topics in six cities worldwide; STEMINIST is a Storify-style aggregator of news about women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

Izzy Johnson of Girl Develop It:

I would advise anyone who wants to be involved in instruction that the first issue you have to address is never about the language. Not “What is a variable?” or “What does a for loop do?” The first issue you have to address is making sure each person in the room believes that they are capable of learning everything you are about to tell them. From your curriculum, to your slides, to your attitude–create a class that builds confidence at every step.

Looking for an NB compiler

I decided to follow the single-letter style and called it C, leaving open the question whether the name represented a progression through the alphabet or through the letters in BCPL.

Via The Code Project, in a paper from 1993, Dennis Ritchie describes the evolution of C from its predecessor languages.