Author Archives: Graham

About Graham

I make it faster and easier for you to create high-quality code.

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

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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

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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 | Leave a comment

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

Posted in whatevs | Tagged | Leave a comment

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

Posted in social-science | Tagged | Leave a comment

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 | Leave a comment

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

Posted in tool-support | Tagged | Leave a comment

Image

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

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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

Posted in software-engineering | Tagged | 1 Comment

Last Chance: Ultimate Programmer Super Stack

Remember this? It’s the last day for the stack today. Buy today for $47.95 within six hours and get my APPropriate Behaviour, along with books on running software businesses, building test-driven developers, and all sorts of software stacks including Ruby, … Continue reading

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