It’s been my policy to view the Internet not as an ‘information highway, but as an electronic asylum filled with babbling loonies. - Mike Royko

Recommended software and technologies

• Linux and Mac OS are vastly superior to NT-based operating systems for most things these days. People who use Windows tend to see it (rightfully) as a mere life support system for legacy software they’re being forced to use. In the past, Windows could lay claim to being the only platform with a decent office suite. This is still arguably true (LibreOffice Calc is close but not nearly enough to compete with Excel in an enterprise setting). That being said, Microsoft in pushing Office365 has been hard at work eradicating one of the few moats Windows has left.

• Most IDEs are bloated beyond belief and encourage a half-awake style of programming (second nature to OOP monkeys) wherein a developer completely relies on some LSP autocomplete mess to finish his code for him. For the most part, autocomplete when writing code is only truly useful for remembering the names of variables, classes, or namespaces you defined far up in a file. Luckily, Vim or its newer fork NeoVim provides keyword autocomplete without the need for a language-specific LSP out of the box.

• Few programming languages come close to Ruby in terms of raw beauty. Ruby is not formless like JavaScript; it has conventions and recommended patterns that suit its features well. Ruby is also succinct, which makes it more readable, not less. Java and C# clog up codebases with verbose and unnecessary boilerplate; Ruby does not enforce class-based design when it is not suitable, thus avoiding many of the problems caused by the former languages. Fans of functional programming languages like Lisp and Haskell will feel at home as well, since Ruby encourages writing code that makes heavy use of chained methods and immutable constructs.

• Besides Ruby, Python is a particularly good language. Python isn’t entirely neurotic about enforcing the use of classes, and Python code is sufficiently succinct for it to be comparable to Ruby. Python has decent functional constructs with its built-in map() and lambda keywords and the standard library is quite good.

Recommended blogs and newsletters

• Scott Locklin writes extremely erudite explorations on progress, technology, and literature

• Luke Smith promotes free software and maintains an interesting personal blog

• Baldur Bjarnason Archive writes about modern software development, especially in web frontends and often includes a panoply of links to other blogs and articles

• The Future, Now and Then opines on the future of digital technology by looking into its past