APPropriate Behaviour
The book about all the things software writers do that aren't writing software.
FSF
Author Archives: Graham
Your reminder that “British English” and “American English” are fictional constructs
Low-stakes conspiracy theory: they were invented by word processing marketers to justify spell-check features that weren’t necessary. Evidence: the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford being in Britain) entry for “-ise” suffix’s first sense is “A frequent spelling of -ize suffix, suffix … Continue reading
Posted in Englisc
Leave a comment
On Scarcity
It’s called scarcity, and we can’t wait to see what you do with it. Let’s start with the important bit. I think that over the last year, with acceleration toward the end of the year, I have heard of over … Continue reading
Posted in software-engineering
Leave a comment
Transcendence
I was at the RSE conference in Newcastle, along with many people whom I have met, worked with, and enjoyed talking to in the past. Many more people whom I have met, worked with, and enjoyed talking to in the … Continue reading
The Image Model
I was reflecting on things that I know now, a couple of decades in to my career, that I wish I had been told at the beginning. Many things came to mind, but the most immediate from a technological perspective … Continue reading
Phrases in computing that might need retiring
The upcoming issue of the SICPers newsletter is all about phrases that were introduced to computing to mean one thing, but seem to get used in practice to mean another. This annoys purists, pedants, and historians: it also annoys the … Continue reading
Posted in whatevs
3 Comments
On entering programming in 2022
I recently taught an introduction to Python course, to final-year undergraduate students. These students had little to zero programming experience, and were all expected to get set up with Python (using the Anaconda environment, which we had determined to be … Continue reading
Posted in edjercashun
1 Comment
More detail on software requirements
My talk at AppDevCon discussed the Requirements Trifecta but turned it into a Quadrinella: you need leadership vision, market feedback, and technical reality to all line up as listed in the trifecta, but I’ve since added a fourth component. You … Continue reading
Posted in software-engineering
Leave a comment
Why mock objects aren’t popular this week
The field of software engineering doesn’t change particularly quickly. Tastes in software engineering change all the time: keeping up with them can quickly result in seasickness or even whiplash. For example, at the moment it’s popular to want to do … Continue reading
Bizarrely, the Guinness book of world records lists the “first microcomputer” as 1980’s Xenix. This doesn’t seem right to me: Xenix is an operating system, not a microcomputer. Xenix was announced in 1980 but not shipped until 1981. The first … Continue reading
On self-taught coders
When a programmer says that they are ‘self-taught’ or that they “taught themselves to code”, what do they mean by it? Did they sit down at a computer, with reference to no other materials, and press buttons and click things … Continue reading
Posted in advancement of the self, edjercashun
Leave a comment
