The Design of Everyday Games

Tea Leaves (via Chris Hanson):

The take-away lesson for software developers, I think, is this: in terms of user interaction design, unless you have a damn good reason to do otherwise, design your game as if it will be targeted at a Gameboy Advance. Protect richness, but destroy, annihilate, and eliminate complexity as if you are Genghis Khan. You provide richness in a game by increasing the number of interesting choices the player has to make. Complexity, on the other hand, is created by making it harder to make those choices, or by hiding the interesting choices in a sea of boring ones. Richness is a virtue. Complexity is just retarded.

DecoratorTools 1.1

DecoratorTools uses stack inspection to make decorators work with Python 2.3.

A Taste of Erlang

David Chisnall:

It used to be that if your code ran quite quickly, a year later you could run it twice as fast for the same amount of money. These days, you’re much less likely to get a chip that’s twice as fast, but you may get one with twice as many cores. If your code is highly parallel, you can just spread it out a bit more.…Two features of Erlang, both of which are built into the language, make it especially suited to writing scalable applications: process creation and message passing.

Erlang Programming Language Programming