APPropriate Behaviour
The book about all the things software writers do that aren't writing software.
FSF
Author Archives: Graham
Design Patterns On Trial
Back in 1999, the OOPSLA conference held a show trial for the “Gang of Four”: Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides. Five years earlier, they had released their book “Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software” at … Continue reading
Falsehoods These Programmers Believed About Countries
Well this was a hard-fought issue. Setting the scene: since April 2020 I’ve been working on Global.health: a Data Science Initiative, where we collate information about Covid-19 cases worldwide and make them available in a standard schema for analysis. In … Continue reading
Introducing the SICPers Newsletter
I write a lot about software engineering. I talk a lot about software engineering. And I read a lot about software engineering. And that stuff is scattered all over the interwebs. Well, some of it isn’t even there, it’s in … Continue reading
Posted in writing
Leave a comment
[objc retain]; continues apace
I just finished recording episode 35 of [objc retain]; the stream on Objective-C programming with Free Software that I co-host with Steven Baker. It is available on Twitch and you can subscribe there to get notified about new episodes. It … Continue reading
Posted in FLOSS, freesoftware, gnustep, objc
Leave a comment
On Apple’s swings and misses
There’s a trope in the Apple-using technologist world that when an Apple innovation doesn’t immediately succeed, they abandon it. It’s not entirely true, let’s see what actually happens. The quote in the above-linked item that supports the claim: “Apple has … Continue reading
Posted in AAPL, UI
2 Comments
Licenses aren’t sufficient
Another recent issue in the world of “centralised open source dependency repositories were a bad idea” initiated by the central contradiction of free software. People want to both give everything away without limitation on who uses it or how, and … Continue reading
Posted in FLOSS
Leave a comment
On the glorification of ignorance
When I wrote I have some small idea of what I’m doing, it was on the basis that DHH was engaging in some exaggeration. Surely software engineers, whose job depends on what they know and what they can learn, would … Continue reading
Posted in whatevs
Leave a comment
Explicitly considering subtyping in inheritance
By far the post on this blog that gains the most long-term interest and attention is why inheritance never made any sense. In this post, I explain that there are three different ways to think about inheritance—ontological inheritance (this sort … Continue reading
I have some small idea of what I’m doing
I feel partly to blame for the current minor internet shitstorm. But first, some scene-setting. There have long been associations between the programmer community and particular subcultures, some of which have become—not monocultural—at least dominant cultures within the world of … Continue reading
Posted in advancement of the self, edjercashun
Tagged History of Software Engineering
Leave a comment
An Imagined History of Agile Software Development
Having benefited from the imagined history of Object-Oriented Programming, it’s time to turn our flawed retelling toolset to Agile. This history is as inaccurate and biased as it is illuminating. In the beginning, there was no software. This was considered … Continue reading
