APPropriate Behaviour
The book about all the things software writers do that aren't writing software.
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Author Archives: Graham
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
Stop ignoring the world
Long term readers will have noticed, and everybody else is about to be told, that this blog has had posts in the Responsibility category since 2010. I’m not rigorous in my use of WordPress categories, but it’s not much of … Continue reading
Posted in Responsibility
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OOP as an organic approach to computing
I’m reading How Not to Network a Nation, which talks a lot about cybernetics. Not merely cybernetics as the theory of control in complex systems (cybernetics shares a root with “governor”, fans of the etymological fallacy!) but cybernetics as the … Continue reading
Posted in OOP
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My platform is no platform
I currently use three of the desktop computing platforms (Windows, macOS and GNU/Linux) and one of the mobile computing platforms (Samsung-flavoured Android); I currently get paid to develop software for “the web”, an amorphous non-platform that acts in many ways … Continue reading
Posted in Responsibility
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In which new developer tools are dull
Over on lobste.rs I said that I don’t hold out much hope for another “blue plane” style event in developer tools. In one of Alan Kay’s presentations, he referred to the ordinary way of things as the pink plane, and … Continue reading
Posted in software-engineering, tool-support
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