When I was a young child, one of my best friends was a turtle. Not a real turtle, although that would have been fun, but a virtual one. My turtle lived inside of an Apple II, an early 8-bit computer, at my elementary school. When I first met her, my turtle, she didn’t do much. […]

Alda is a text-based programming language for music composition. It allows you to write and play back music using only a text editor and the command line.

Here's a program roughly 0% of programmers know how to write: generate a list of random tweets, without duplication. You may think you know how to do this, but you almost assuredly don't. Say you work at Twitter and have to select just one tweet at random. This is an easy problem. Generate a random…