<p>Like pretty much every other programmer with a Mac, I’m currently looking at <a href="https://developer.apple.com/swift/">Swift</a>. Will I write anything but toy programs in it? I don’t know yet - I don’t really write any Mac-ish software on my Mac,  just unix-ish programs. If Swift doesn’t escape the OS X and iOS ecosystems it’ll be a nice exercise in a neat language that’s not really that relevant to the world at large, or at least to my part of the…

<p>I used to use <a href="http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CarbonEmacsPackage">Carbon Emacs</a> on OS X for quite a while, but with the release of Emacs 24 I switched to the stock GNU Emacs distribution. While GNU Emacs works fine on OS X, once you throw a German keyboard layout in the mix it doesn’t work so well as OS X uses Option + Number keys for a variety of characters needed for programming like [] and {}. GNU Emacs uses Option as Meta out of the box so the key mapping doesn’t…

<p>If you look at really productive programmers - like the top 10-20% - there are usually a couple of characteristics that they share. Aptitude and in-depth understanding of both the system they are working on and the technologies involved is obviously one very important factor. Another factor that tends to be overlooked is that these programmers are also masters of their tools in the same way that a master craftsman - say, a carpenter - is also a master of their tools. That includes potentially…