APPropriate Behaviour
The book about all the things software writers do that aren't writing software.
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Author Archives: Graham
Improving a presentation with slides
Take a look at your slides. For each slide, think how you would present the same information if you didn’t have the slide. Practise that, so that you can give the information on the slide without using the slide as … Continue reading
Posted in performance, Talk
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“When I had that problem”
A common lie in programming is that every project is new, that no problem has been seen before. This is the reason given for estimates being bad, for plans being bad, for design being bad…for anything other than diving in … Continue reading
Posted in advancement of the self, edjercashun
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PL personality theory
An analysis of programmer personality traits inferred from their answer to the question “which is your favourite programming language?” Algol About to re-enact that scene in Jumanji where Robin Williams has a huge beard. Basic Remembers a time when you … Continue reading
Posted in whatevs
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The paradox of scripting
But how can scripting be dead? There’s bash, and powershell, and ruby, and…even Perl is still popular among sysadmins. There’s never been a better time to be a programmer or other IT professional trying to automate a task. True, but … Continue reading
Posted in script
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The death of scripting
Back in the day, when programmers knew that they couldn’t possibly think of everything somebody might want to do with a computer, there were scripts. If somebody could find enough of the pieces of the thing that they wanted to … Continue reading
Posted in architecture of sorts, script
8 Comments
On having things to say
I enjoyed Jaimee’s discussion of preparing her public talks, and realised that my approach has moved in a different way. I’ve probably talked about this before but I’ve also changed how I go about it. This is my technique, particularly … Continue reading
Posted in Talk
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On running out of words
John Gruber’s subscription to Wiktionary expired: At just 20 percent of unit sales, Apple isn’t even close to a monopoly. At 92 percent profit share, they have a market dominance that rivals any actual monopoly the tech industry has ever … Continue reading
Posted in AAPL, Business
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Imperative Programming in Swift
A cliche in programming is that certain ways of writing programs make it possible to “reason about” code. So it should be possible to form an argument that proceeds from some axioms to a conclusion about the code we’re looking … Continue reading
Posted in FP, IP
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Honestly, this next post will take a while.
Functional Programming in Object-Oriented Programming in Functional Programming in Swift
The objects that I’ve been building up over the last few posts have arbitrarily broad behaviours. They can respond to any selector drawn from the set of all possible strings. As with all art, beauty is produced by imposing constraints. … Continue reading
Posted in FP, OOP
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