Like pretty much every other programmer with a Mac, I’m currently looking at Swift. Will I write anything but toy programs in it? I don’t know yet - I don’t really write any Mac-ish software on my Mac,  just unix-ish programs. If Swift doesn’t escape the OS X and iOS ecosystems it’ll be a nice exercise in a neat language that’s not really that relevant to the world at large, or at least to my part of the world at large. Not that this sort of vendor lock-in can’t work well - Visual Basic 6, anybody?

For those of us who remember when the BBC Micro was the home computer with the fastest Basic implementation available, a long time ago, and was pretty legendary in home computing circles in Europe. It didn’t sell that much outside of the UK, mostly because of its price. It was also the target system for the original implementation of Elite. Matt Godbolt is building an emulator in JavaScript. First post of his series can be found here.

Admittedly I’m  not the biggest fan of git - I prefer Mercurial - but we’re using it at work and it does a good job as a DVCS. However, we’re mostly a Windows shop and the out of the box performance of Git for Windows is anything but stellar when you are using ssh as the transport for git. That’s not too much bother with most of our repos but we have a couple of fairly big ones and clone performance with those matters.

Visual Studio 2013, much like its predecessor Visual Studio 2012, also “features” the SHOUTY uppercase menus. Like in Visual Studio 2012, these can be turned off using a registry setting.

tl;dr - run this command in PowerShell:

Set-ItemProperty -Path HKCU:SoftwareMicrosoftVisualStudio12.0General -Name SuppressUppercaseConversion -Type DWord -Value 1

Phil Hagelberg published an interesting blog post about the Ergodox keyboard. I’m a self-confessed input hardware nerd and have been a Kinesis Ergo/Advantage user for over a dozen years now. I love those keyboards - otherwise I wouldn’t keep buying them - but Phil makes a very good point that they’re bulky, not something you quickly throw into a bag and take with you for a hacking session at the local coffee shop. It’s good to see alternatives out there, especially as there seems to be less of a focus on ergonomic input devices recently.

The Gnu Emacs for Windows distribution appears to be pretty good at inferring where a reasonable place for $HOME is, straight out of the box. In my case, said reasonable place was %USERPROFILE%/AppData/Roaming which was an entirely acceptable default.

That is, until several other tools entered the picture and disagreed with Emacs. We’ve recently switched to using git at work and the git ecosystem  needed to have some ideas where its home was. I’m using Git Extensions as the “regular” Windows GUI and TortoiseGit for the Windows Explorer integration, plus the awesome Posh-Git that even made me learn basic PowerShell.

Throwing caution into the wind this morning, I’m having an updatefest only a few hours after the software was released:

While I’ve grown accustomed to using Win8 - the Surface RT helped - from using the 8.1 prerelease it really looked like 8.1 would be an improvement, so I bit the bullet and installed the upgrades as soon as they were available.

Well, as soon as I got up the day they were available, that is.

If you look at really productive programmers - like the top 10-20% - there are usually a couple of characteristics that they share. Aptitude and in-depth understanding of both the system they are working on and the technologies involved is obviously one very important factor. Another factor that tends to be overlooked is that these programmers are also masters of their tools in the same way that a master craftsman - say, a carpenter - is also a master of their tools. That includes potentially obscure tools, and the ones handed down from grandps or found at a yard sale.

The default installation of msysgit (aka the official git client for Windows) is unfortunately built without python support. There are understandable reasons as to why this is, starting with “where the heck do I find the various python versions on Windows”. For me the problem was that I needed git-p4 to extract some code history out of a Perforce repository and guess what, git-p4 is written in Python. Only solution for me was that I had to find a way to make this work short of throwing Linux in a VM just to get a git import going.

I generally don’t post that much about the tools I use as they’re pretty standard fare and most of the time, your success as a programmer depends more on your skills than on your tools. Mastery of your tools will make you a better software engineer, but if you put the tools first, you end up with the cart before the horse.

I guess people have noticed that I use Emacs a lot :). My use of it is mainly for writing and editing code (and some newsgroup reading at home using Gnus) and I generally use it only for longer coding sessions. As a lot of my work is on Windows, one of the main tools I use is Visual Studio - almost exclusively 2010 right now, although I’ve taken a few peeks at 2012 and have used pretty much every version since VC++ 4. While I tend to use Emacs as soon as I’m editing more than two lines I tend to make the small changes that you get to make while debugging in Visual Studio.