load01 11/12/2011

• Confidence Game : CJR

  “The question that mass amateurization poses to traditional media is ‘What happens when the costs of reproduction and distribution go away? What happens when there is nothing unique about publishing anymore because users can do it for themselves?’ We are now starting to see that question being answered.”—Clay Shirky
  
  “The whole notion of ‘long-form journalism’ is writer-centered, not public-centered.”—Jeff Jarvis
  
  “As a journalist, I’ve long taken it for granted that, for example, my readers know more than I do—and it’s liberating.”—Dan Gillmor
  
  “As career journalists and managers we have entered a new era where what we know and what we traditionally do has finally found its value in the marketplace, and that value is about zero.”—John Paton
  
  “The story is the thing.”—S. S. McClure
  
  One
  
  Ida M. Tarbell, a writer for McClure’s Magazine, a general-interest monthly, was chatting with her good friend and editor, John S. Phillips, in the magazine’s offices near New York’s Madison Square Park, trying to decide what she should take on next.
  
  Tarbell, then forty-three years old, was already one of the most prominent journalists in America, having written popular multipart historical sketches of Napoleon, Lincoln, and a French revolutionary figure known as Madame Roland, a moderate republican guillotined during the Terror. Thanks in part to her work, McClure’s circulation had jumped to about 400,000, making it one of the most popular, and profitable, publications in the country.

  tags: culture

• Mythology in C

  The PDP-11 was a cool little machine.  It was first released by Digital Equipment Corporation in 1970, as the next logical step in the minicomputer evolution.  It had a really cool instruction set, a really cool interface bus, and people who saw it fell in love with it. 
  
  Including the people at Bell Labs, such as Ken Thompson, one of the architects of Unix.
  
  You can read more about the PDP-11 here.
  
  Sadly, the PDP-11 fostered a set of nonsensical myths about programming, and the C language and C compiler embodied many of these myths.  Generations of programmers learned to program, either on the PDP-11, or taught by people who learned on the PDP-11, and all these people subscribe to the same set of pointless and obsolete myths about programming.

  tags: programming

• How to Pick a Language

  How do you pick a programming language, to learn or to use for a project?
   
  This article probably overlaps a lot with what others have already said on this topic.  But I try to add a categorization of programming languages that reflects the way they are discussed on blogs and discussion sites.  I think these categories are often implicit in discussions on the programming sub-reddit, Hacker News, or Lambda the Ultimate, but never made explicit for the benefit of younger developers.

  tags: programming

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.