programming musings

I’ve just stumbled upon (via a post in John Cook’s blog) an old article back at kuro5hin entitled the greatest program ever written. It describes 1k chess on the ZX81, a program capable of playing chess on the Sinclair ZX81, a computer endowed with a total memory of 1024 bytes, and written by David Horne. I didn’t believe it either, until i saw it by myself. Kids these days!

Update:I’ve just learnt, thanks to a comment below, that there’s actually an earlier chess program, written by Peter Jennings, of similar characteristics: Microchess for the Kim-1 computer. The linked webpages contain lots of information about the program, including listings. Pretty fun stuff.

Today is the anniversary of programming musings: it’s been 4 years, 141 posts, 429 comments and almost 300,000 visits since i wrote my first post. A drop in the web ocean, i know, but enough to make waves in my local pond, and much more than i expected. These are the twelve most visited entries so far:

• A Haskell bookshelf
• Programmers go bananas
• A Scheme bookshelf
• Beyond mainstream object-oriented programming
• The object-oriented cake
• Erlang Now!
• Vintage CLOS
• Erlang, Termite and a blog
• Continuation kata
• Here’s to Andy
• Reinventing programming
• The joy of REPL

Thanks!