APPropriate Behaviour
The book about all the things software writers do that aren't writing software.
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Tag Archives: History of Software Engineering
Runtime verification in Erlang by using contracts
About this paper Runtime verification in Erlang by using contracts, L.-A. Fredlund et al, presented at WFLP 2018. Notes Spoiler alert, but the conclusion to my book OOP the Easy Way is that we should have independently-running objects, like we … Continue reading
Hyperloops for our minds
We were promised a bicycle for our minds. What we got was more like a highly-efficient, privately run mass transit tunnel. It takes us where it’s going, assuming we pay the owner. Want to go somewhere else? Tough. Can’t afford … Continue reading
Ratio
The web has a weird history with comments. I have a book called Zero Comments, a critique of blog culture from 2008. It opens by quoting from a 2005 post from a now defunct website, stodge.org. The Wayback Machine does … Continue reading
Mach and Matchmaker: kernel and language support for object-oriented distributed systems
About this paper Mach and Matchmaker: kernel and language support for object-oriented distributed systems , Michael B. Jones and Richard F. Rashid, from the proceedings of OOPSLA ’86. Notes Yes, 1986 was a long time ago, but the topics of … Continue reading
Posted in academia, architecture of sorts, OOP
Tagged History of Software Engineering
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The balloon goes up
To this day, many Smalltalk projects have a hot air balloon in their logo. These reference the cover of the issue of Byte Magazine in which Smalltalk-80 was shared with the wider programming community. Modern Smalltalks all have a lot … Continue reading
Why 80?
80 characters per line is a standard worth sticking to, even today. OK, why? Well, back up. Let’s examine the axioms. Is 80 characters per line a standard? Not really, it’s a convention. IBM cards (which weren’t just made by … Continue reading
The Fragile Manifesto
A lot of what I’ve been reading and thinking about of late is about the agile backlash. More speed, lower velocity reflects on IT teams pursuing “deliver more/newer IT” at the cost of “help the company achieve its mission”. Grooming … Continue reading
On the continuous history of approximation
The Difference Engine – the Charles Babbage machine, not the steampunk novel – is a device for finding successive solutions to polynomial equations by adding up the differences introduced by each term between the successive input values. This sounds like … Continue reading
The ABC of Software Engineering Research
About this paper The ABC of Software Engineering Research by Klaas-Jan Stol and Brian Fitzgerald, published October 2018. See link for full citation. Notes There are too many ways in which terms describing research methods in software engineering get used, … Continue reading
Cleaner Code
Readers of OOP the easy way will be familiar with the distinction between object-oriented programming and procedural programming. You will have read, in that book, about how what we claim is OOP in the sentence “OOP has failed” is actually … Continue reading
