APPropriate Behaviour
The book about all the things software writers do that aren't writing software.
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Author Archives: Graham
Reasoning about reasoning about software
Functional programmers like to claim that you can’t reason about mutable state programs. Some thoughts: the first half of the book A Discipline of Programming by Edsger W. Dijkstra tells you how to do it. That half of the book … Continue reading
All the things
It’s been a long time since I had a side project, or one that didn’t get abandoned very early on. I tend to get sidetracked by other thoughts about computing, or think “while I’m doing this, I’m leaving that unsolved” … Continue reading
Posted in advancement of the self, documentation, learning, techradar
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Against our values as a company
I’m going to pick on Patreon, not because they’re special, but because they’re typical. Here is a quote from a blog post in which they Back-pedalled a change to their pricing structure: We overstepped our bounds and injected ourselves into … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
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Falsehoods programmers believe about programming
There is no ethical impact of my job; I build technological systems and it’s up to others how they use them. Software is a purely technical discipline. There is some innate affinity for computer programming which you must be born … Continue reading
Posted in code-level
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Don’t like a new way of working? Just point out the absurdity of suggesting that the old way was broken: Somehow, the microservices folks have failed to notice all that software that was in fact delivered as monoliths. What the … Continue reading
An unhelpful distinction
Object-Oriented Programming is quite simple: it’s just choosing what function to run based on the parameters to the function (whether through method sending like Smalltalk, polymorphic lookup like CLOS, or table searching like C++: usually pattern-matching like Haskell would be … Continue reading
Posted in OOP
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GNUstep is more important now than ever
In creating a pull request for GNUstep-base, the Free Software implementation of the Foundation library from Objective-C, I realised that if there was ever a time for GNUstep, now is it. Although GNUstep may have been envisaged as an official … Continue reading
Posted in gnustep
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On the lesser presentations
Advice on presentations – including that given on this blog, is often geared toward the “showbusiness” presentation. We’re usually talking about the big conference talk or product launch, where you can afford to put in the time to make a … Continue reading
Posted in performance, Talk
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I frequently see posts/articles/screeds asking why people don’t contribute to open source. If it’s important that recipients of open source software contribute upstream, and you are angry when they don’t, why use licences like MIT, Apache, GPL or BSD that … Continue reading
The Atoms of Programming
In the world of physics, there are many different models that can be used, though typically each of them has different applicability to different contexts. At the small scale, quantum physics is a very useful model, Newtonian physics will yield … Continue reading
