It has been brought to my attention that some readers seem to have misunderstood the writing style used in Real Programming: We use black humor, sarcasm, and exaggerations to drive our points through in an entertaining way. It should be obvious after reading the back cover, but obviously it wasn't. (It should also be noted that "obvious" is one of the most frequently used words in the book. Obviously.) To remedy that, I'm adding some warning labels. The code can still be read for free without being exposed to our acerbic writing style.

Kode24 has an article today about our book and methods. Kode24 is one of very few Norwegian-only programming news sites. Have a look if you can read Norwegian!

Dårlige utviklere tror jobben er ferdig klokka fem [kode24.no]

Codon: It never ends, this shit [youtube.com]

I'm not gonna link to it since I'm not gonna promote it more than necessary. Check out some of the popular tech news sites on the interwebs, or scoot over to Github if you missed it.

Here's what they claim in their code pit:

Codon is a high-performance Python compiler that compiles Python code to native machine code without any runtime overhead. Typical speedups over Python are on the order of 10-100x or more, on a single thread. Codon's performance is typically on par with (and sometimes better than) that of C/C++.

One of the persons behind Codon was also behind Halide. Halide was an earlier "faster-than-C" programming language. I published a critique of their rigged example code and suspicious test equipment back in 2012: A look at Halide's SSE2 3x3 Box Filter. The subject was revisited in the book Real Programming. Get the chapter freely here: Chapter 7: Research is Hard.

Now, 11 years later, they're at it again. Claiming that some new programming language or interpreter or "compiler" is faster than C is like claiming it runs faster than the CPU. So, by reduction, a multiply should take 0 cycles, or maybe -1. I hear they're also working on a rocket that goes faster than the speed of light and a car that runs on willpower.

There are no shortcuts in programming. I wonder what they'll come up with in 2034. No, I don't care. Never mind.

Today marks the two year anniversary of the launch of Ekte Programmering, the initial Norwegian version of Real Programming.

To mark the occasion, we have decided to release Real Programming Condensed (PDF, 368KB): A 10-page summary of the book. Read it, send it to friends, copy it, and quote from it.

Happy new year! It's been a fun 2022 with the launch of the new Xmas demo, the remastering of the previous Xmas demo, the guest lecture at the University of Oslo, Real Programming (the Norwegian version) sneaking into the National Library of Norway (it's a mandatory optional process which requires submitting three copies, so not that hard, but it sounds cool), the rebuilding of the lab in the new offices, and the arrival of the NVidia AGX Orin Developer Kit. We also had some (professional) fun at Huddly where we did top secret stuff involving their excellent cameras.

Stay tuned for more awesomely great stuff in 2023! (May be considered regular stuff in some regions)

Ekte Programmering

Real Programming