APPropriate Behaviour
The book about all the things software writers do that aren't writing software.
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Author Archives: Graham
Fun and games (with rewritten rules) in Objective-C
An object-oriented programming environment is not a set of rules. Programs do not need to be constructed according to the rules supplied by the environment. An object-oriented environment includes tools for constructing new rules, and programs can use these to … Continue reading
Posted in code-level, OOP
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Objective-Curry
Sadly it’s not called Schoenfinkeling, but that’s the name of the person who noticed that there’s no reason to ever have a function with more than one argument. What you think is a function with two arguments is actually a … Continue reading
Posted in code-level, Foundation, OOP
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A subtle [mis]understanding of monads
As I said when talking about Learning Phases, one of the things that happens when I’m trying to learn a new thing is that I build an analogy in terms of something I do understand. This can be dangerous when … Continue reading
Posted in FP, OOP
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Today I learned that I don’t even know how to Unix. I discovered that it’s possible for a POSIX system to leave PATH_MAX and similar variables undefined if it truly has no restrictions on their length.
About 10 years ago, we decided that the performance gains in single-core processors that come “for free” with advancing semiconductor processes were slowing down. Many chip makers switched to scaling the number of cores on a die, and promoted parallel … Continue reading
Like Java, only functional
An idea that clarified itself to me in discussion today is that Swift is to Functional Programming as Java is to Object-Oriented Programming: it is the thing that lets you write C and pretend you’ve adopted some posh-sounding “paradigmatic” non-imperative … Continue reading
Posted in code-level, Java
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Learning phases
I’ve been trying to learn things this week (specifically Haskell). So far I’ve been through a lot of different moods, and I thought it’d be handy to write them down so that next time I’m the teacher I can remember … Continue reading
Posted in advancement of the self, edjercashun
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I’ve realised that when I read that a tool or framework is “opinionated”, I interpret that as meaning that I’m going to have to spend time on working out how to express my solution in its terms. I have enough … Continue reading
The Tankard Brigade
I have a guideline that seems to apply to many pursuits and hobbies: any activity can be fun until there’s too high a density of men with beards and tankards. Of course, they aren’t all men (though many are) and … Continue reading
Posted in whatevs
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Some people like to refer to OS X as UNIX-like when it’s actually a UNIX. There was a time when it was UNIX-like and some people liked to refer to it as a UNIX, but it’s not now.
