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
Packaging software
I’ve been learning about Debian Packaging. I’ve built OS X packages, RPMs, Dockerfiles, JARs, and others, but never dpkgs, so I thought I’d give it a go. My goal is to make a suite of GNUstep packages for Debian. There … Continue reading
Concurrent objects and SCOOP
Representing concurrency in an object-oriented system has been a long-standing problem. Encapsulating the concurrency primitives via objects and methods is easy enough, but doesn’t get us anywhere. We still end up composing our programs out of threads and mutexes and … Continue reading
Microservices for the Desktop
In OOP the Easy Way, I make the argument that microservices are a rare instance of OOP done well: Microservice adopters are able to implement different services in different technologies, to think about changes to a given service only in … Continue reading
On Blue Agile
Ron Jeffries has some interesting posts lately on Dark Scrum, the idea that poor programmers are being chained to the code face in the software mines, forced to unthinkingly crank out features under Agile-sequel banners like “velocity” and “embracing change”. … Continue reading
On the inevitability of Photoshop for iPad
Back in 2011, I was speaking at QCon London at the invitation of my friend and de Programmatica Ipsum co-conspirator akosma, and one of the conference’s community events was an iOS developer meet-up hosted in the conference centre. I think … Continue reading
Beginner thoughts
Back story: my period of walkabout, in which I went to see the rest of the computing world beyond Apple land, started in November 2014. This was shortly after Swift’s introduction at WWDC 2014. It ended in October 2018, by … Continue reading
Two Schools
There always seem to be two schools in software, though exactly where the gates are varies. Alan Kay described how Edsger Dijkstra noticed that “the Atlantic has two sides”. It was basically all about how different the approaches to computing … Continue reading
Or maybe, because we want to
How (and Why) Developers Use the Dynamic Features of Programming Languages: The Case of Smalltalk is an interesting analysis of the reality of dynamic programming in Smalltalk (Squeak and Pharo, really). Taking the 1,000 largest projects on SqueakSource, the authors … Continue reading
Eating the bubble
How far back do you want to go to find people telling you that JavaScript is eating the world? Last year? Two years ago? Three? Five? It’s a slow digestion process, if that’s what is happening. Five years ago, there … Continue reading
Netscape won
Back when AOL was a standalone company and Sun Microsystems existed at all, Netscape said that they wanted Windows to be a buggy collection of device drivers that people used to access the web, which would be the real platform. … Continue reading
