We can understand why shaderacademy.com chose that name over “the shady school,” but whatever they call it, if you are looking to brush up on graphics programming with GPUs, it might be just what you are looking for. The website offers challenges that task you to draw various 2D and 3D graphics using code in […]
[David] is building a project with an OLED, a keyboard, and an RP2040. He’s perfected a scanning routine in C to work with the keyboard, but he still had some places he wanted to use even lower-level instructions. That was as good an excuse as any to experiment with inline assembly language inside the C […]
As one of the oldest programming languages still in common use today, and essential for the first wave of Artificial Intelligence research during the 1950s and 60s, Lisp is often the focus of interpreters that can run on very low-powered systems. Such is the case with [Robert van Engelen]’s TinyLisp, which only takes 99 lines […]
There’s long been a push to stop writing code as a sequence of lines and go to something graphical, which has been very successful in some areas and less so in others. But even when you use something graphical like Scratch, it is really standing in for lines of code? Many graphical environments are really […]
One reason Forth remains popular is that it is very simple to create, but also very powerful. But there’s an even older language that can make the same claim: LISP. Sure, some people think that’s an acronym for “lots of irritating spurious parenthesis,” but if you can get past the strange syntax, the language is […]
Originally known as FORTRAN, but written in lower case since the 1990s with Fortran 90, this language was developed initially by John Backus as a way to make writing programs for the IBM 704 mainframe easier. The 704 was a 1954 mainframe with the honor of being the first mass-produced computer that supported hardware-based floating […]
Do you use a spell checker? We’ll guess you do. Would you use a button that just said “correct all spelling errors in document?” Hopefully not. Your word processor probably doesn’t even offer that as an option. Why? Because a spellchecker will reject things not in its dictionary (like Hackaday, maybe). It may guess the […]
JavaScript is everywhere these days, even outside the browser. Everyone knows that this is because JavaScript is the best programming language, which was carefully assembled by computer experts and absolutely not monkeyed together in five days by some bloke at Netscape in the 90s. Nowhere becomes this more apparent than in aspects like JavaScript’s brilliantly […]
It is virtually a rite of passage for C programmers to realize that they can write their own cooperative multitasking system. C is low-level enough, and there are several ways to approach the problem, so, like Jedi light sabers, each one is a little bit different. [Christoph Wolcher] took his turn, and not only is […]
Recently AI risk and benefit evaluation company METR ran a randomized control test (RCT) on a gaggle of experienced open source developers to gain objective data on how the use of LLMs affects their productivity. Their findings were that using LLM-based tools like Cursor Pro with Claude 3.5/3.7 Sonnet reduced productivity by about 19%, with […]