Programmer migration patterns

Programmer migration patterns” is an interesting attempt to identify where programmers start and how move from one programming language to another. This is not precise science, obviously. But I have to say that I mostly agree with the findings.

The first language that I learned (back in school) was BASIC, which then gave me some legs with Visual Basic later in college. Also in college, I’ve learned assembler, C, and Pascal, which guided me to some amateur and professional development with Delphi.

Soon after that I discovered Linux, which meant shell scripting. I played with awk, but I didn’t have to dive deep, as Perl was already available. Perl was probably my first true programming language, which I learned outside of school and college, and which I have been using for years to build all kinds of things. I still love Perl dearly, but the last few years I have been mostly using PHP, with some occasional Python.

JavaScript, however, is where I draw the line. I’ve been scarred by JavaScript back in the 90s, so I can’t force myself to go back. And then again, I don’t really have to. I’ll leave JavaScript, TypeScript, and node.js for the younger generations.

Let the source be with you!

The JavaScript Developer’s Reading List

The JavaScript Developer’s Reading List” is yet another hand-picked collection of books and resources for web developers in general and JavaScript programmers in particular. The selection is mostly focused around React and GraphQL, but there are plenty of more generic resources about JavaScript, software development, and Computer Science.

VivaGraphJS – Graph drawing library for JavaScript


VivaGraphJS is a graph drawing library for JavaScript.  It’s a lot prettier than the results of GraphViz dot.  Or at least, it’s easier to get fancy things out of it.  It also ties a lot easier into the web development in general and your DOM document in particular.




percollate – a command-line tool to turn web pages into beautifully formatted PDFs


percollate is a command-line tool to convert web pages into PDF files.  It supports single-page and multi-page files, can fetch the HTML documents from the web, understands accelerated mobile pages (see AMP), and even allows some control of the output with CSS snippets.




Glider.js – fast, light-weight, dependency free, responsive, native scrolling list with paging controls


For anyone who needs an image gallery or any scrolling list for that matter, Glider.js looks like a good option.  It’s super simple to use, light, responsive, and dependency free.  Have a look at some demos here.