Monthly Archives: July 2017

Two ways of thinking

Posted on 2017-07-26 by Graham

I’ve used this idea in conversations for years, and can’t find a post on it, which I find surprising but there you go. There are, broadly speaking, two different ways to look at programming languages. And I think that these … Continue reading →

Posted in code-level, social-science | Leave a comment

If Object-Oriented Programming were announced today

Posted on 2017-07-22 by Graham

Here’s an idea: the current backlash against OOP is actually because people aren’t doing OOP, they’re doing whatever they were doing before OOP. But they’re calling it OOP, because the people who were promoting OOP wanted them to believe that … Continue reading →

Posted in FP, OOP | Leave a comment

Open Source: because I got mine, so fuck you

Posted on 2017-07-18 by Graham

The Free Software movement has at its core the idea that people have the freedom to use, study, share, and improve the software on their computers. The modern developer “ecosystem” has co-opted this to create a two-tier society: a developer … Continue reading →

Posted in freesoftware | 6 Comments

Technical debt and jury service

Posted on 2017-07-11 by Graham

We have the idea that in addition to the product development backlogs for our teams, there’s an engineering backlog where technical debt paydown, process/tooling improvements, and other sitewide engineering concerns get recorded. Working on them is done in time that … Continue reading →

Posted in software-engineering | 1 Comment

The worst phrase in software marketing

Posted on 2017-07-06 by Graham

“Rewritten from the ground up”. Please. Your old version mostly worked, except for those few corner cases that I’d learned how to work around. Now I don’t know whether the stuff that did work does work now, and I don’t … Continue reading →

Posted in Business | 2 Comments