APPropriate Behaviour
The book about all the things software writers do that aren't writing software.
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Author Archives: Graham
King Arthur: By what name are you known?
Why is it we’re not allowed to call the Apple guy “Tim Apple” when everybody calls the O’Reilly guy “Tim O’Reilly”?
Posted in whatevs
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Pythonicity
The same community that says: There should be one– and preferably only one –obvious way to do it. Also says: So essentially when someone says something is unpythonic, they are saying that the code could be re-written in a way … Continue reading
Posted in Python
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Runtime verification in Erlang by using contracts
About this paper Runtime verification in Erlang by using contracts, L.-A. Fredlund et al, presented at WFLP 2018. Notes Spoiler alert, but the conclusion to my book OOP the Easy Way is that we should have independently-running objects, like we … Continue reading
There’s more to it
We saw in Apple’s latest media event a lot of focus on privacy. They run machine learning inferences locally so they can avoid uploading photos to the cloud (though Photo Stream means they’ll get there sooner or later anyway). My … Continue reading
Posted in AAPL, Privacy
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Hyperloops for our minds
We were promised a bicycle for our minds. What we got was more like a highly-efficient, privately run mass transit tunnel. It takes us where it’s going, assuming we pay the owner. Want to go somewhere else? Tough. Can’t afford … Continue reading
Ratio
The web has a weird history with comments. I have a book called Zero Comments, a critique of blog culture from 2008. It opens by quoting from a 2005 post from a now defunct website, stodge.org. The Wayback Machine does … Continue reading
Mach and Matchmaker: kernel and language support for object-oriented distributed systems
About this paper Mach and Matchmaker: kernel and language support for object-oriented distributed systems , Michael B. Jones and Richard F. Rashid, from the proceedings of OOPSLA ’86. Notes Yes, 1986 was a long time ago, but the topics of … Continue reading
Posted in academia, architecture of sorts, OOP
Tagged History of Software Engineering
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The balloon goes up
To this day, many Smalltalk projects have a hot air balloon in their logo. These reference the cover of the issue of Byte Magazine in which Smalltalk-80 was shared with the wider programming community. Modern Smalltalks all have a lot … Continue reading
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I love my Testsphere deck, from Ministry of Testing. I’ve twice seen Riskstorming in action, and the first time that I took part I bought a deck of these cards as soon as I got back to my desk. I’m … Continue reading
Posted in tool-support
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Why 80?
80 characters per line is a standard worth sticking to, even today. OK, why? Well, back up. Let’s examine the axioms. Is 80 characters per line a standard? Not really, it’s a convention. IBM cards (which weren’t just made by … Continue reading
