I always intended "Programming in the 21st Century" to have a limited run. I knew since the Recovering Programmer entry from January 1, 2010, that I needed to end it. It just took a while.

And now, an explanation.

I started this blog to talk about issues tangentially related to programming, about soft topics like creativity and inspiration and how code is a medium for implementing creative visions. Instead I worked through more technical topics that I'd been kicking around over the years. That was fun! Purely Functional Retrogames is something I would have loved to read in 1998. More than once I've googled around and ended up back at one of my essays.

As I started shifting gears and getting back toward what I originally wanted to do, there was one thing that kept bothering me: the word programming in the title.

I don't think of myself as a programmer. I write code, and I often enjoy it when I do, but that term programmer is both limiting and distracting. I don't want to program for its own sake, not being interested in the overall experience of what I'm creating. If I start thinking too much about programming as a distinct entity then I lose sight of that. Now that I've exhausted what I wanted to write about, I can clear those topics out of my head and focus more on using technology to make fun things.

Thanks for reading!

It's hard to sum up 200+ articles, but here's a start. This is not even close to a full index. See the archives if you want everything. (There are some odd bits in there.)

widely linked

popular

on creativity

others that I like

Erlang

retro

Also see the previous entry for all of the functional programming articles.

Programming as if Performance Mattered is something I wrote in 2004 which used to be linked from every prog21 entry.