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Chiron Codex: helping software engineers become centaurs. APPropriate Behaviour
The book about all the things software writers do that aren't writing software.
Author Archives: Graham
On twitter [or otherwise]
As occasionally happens, I’ve been reevaluating my relationships with social media. The last time I did this I received emails asking whether I was dead, so let me assure you that such rumours are greatly exaggerated. Long time readers will … Continue reading
On null
I’ve had an interesting conversation on the topic of null over the last few days, spurred by the logical disaster of null. I disagreed with the statement in the post that: Logically-speaking, there is no such thing as Null This … Continue reading
“Brand”: you win some, you lose some
The 20th anniversary of the iMac reminded me that while many people capitalises the word “iMac” as Apple would like, including John “I never capitalise trademarks the way companies like” Gruber, nobody uses the article-less form that Apple does: So … Continue reading
Posted in AAPL
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Let’s talk about self-documenting code
You think your code is self-documenting. That it doesn’t need comments or Doxygen or little diagrams, because it’s clear from the code what it does. I do not think that that is true. Even if your reader has at least … Continue reading
Rethinking Object-Oriented Design figures
My iPad-drawn graphics in Rethinking OOD at App Builders 2018 were not very good, so here are the ink-and-paper versions. Please have them to hand when viewing the talk (which is the first of a two-parter, though I haven’t pitched … Continue reading
Posted in OOP, Talk
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Inheritance still doesn’t make any sense
Some ideas based on feedback to the Why inheritance never made any sense: Feedback: Subtypes are necessary The only one of these that is practically workable is behaviour inheritance <=> subtype inheritance: I’m sorry that you were exposed to Java … Continue reading
Posted in OOP
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Subatomic Chocolate
This started out as a toot thread, but “threaded tooting is tedious for everybody involved” so here’s the single post that thread should have been. The “Electron vs. native” debate doesn’t make much sense. I feel like I’ve been here … Continue reading
Posted in UI
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What’s better than semver?
Many software libraries are released with version “numbers” that follow a scheme called Semantic Versioning. A semantic version is three numbers separated by dots, of the form x.y.z, where: if x is zero, all bets are off. Otherwise; z increments … Continue reading
Posted in software-engineering
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What Lenin taught me about software movements
In What is to be done?: Burning Questions of our Movement, Lenin lists four roles who contribute to fomenting revolution – the theoreticians, the propagandists, the agitators, and the organisers: The theoreticians write research works on tariff policy, with the … Continue reading
Posted in whatevs
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Why inheritance never made any sense
There are three different types of inheritance going on. Ontological inheritance is about specialisation: this thing is a specific variety of that thing (a football is a sphere and it has this radius) Abstract data type inheritance is about substitution: … Continue reading
