APPropriate Behaviour
The book about all the things software writers do that aren't writing software.
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Author Archives: Graham
Essence and accident in language model-assisted coding
In 1986, Fred Brooks posited that there was “no silver bullet” in software engineering—no tool or process that would yield an order-of-magnitude improvement in productivity. He based this assertion on the division of complexity into that which is essential to … Continue reading
Posted in AI, software-engineering, tool-support
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Tony Hoare and negative space
The Primeagen calls it Negative-Space Programming: using assertions to cut off the space of possible programs, leaving only the ones you believe are possible given your knowledge of a program’s state at a point. Tony Hoare just called it “logic”, … Continue reading
When did people favor composition over inheritance?
The phrase “favor composition over inheritance” has become one of those thought-terminating cliches in software design, and I always like to take a deeper look at those to understand where they come from and what ideas we’re missing if we … Continue reading
Posted in history, ooa/d, OOP
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LLMs and reinforcement learning
My reflection on the Richard Sutton interview with Dwarkesh Patel was that it was interesting how much the two participants talk past each other, and fail to find common ground. Particularly that they couldn’t agree on the power of reinforcement learning, when … Continue reading
Posted in AI
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Prompting software or supporting engineering
As we learn to operate these new generative predictive transformers, those of us in the world of software need to work out what we’re doing it for. The way in which we use them, the results we get—and the direction … Continue reading
Posted in AI
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Unintended consequences
As the shift in content of this blog has made abundantly clear, for the last five years I’ve been doing a PhD. I’ve also been working full-time, so that research and study has basically taken up all of my spare … Continue reading
Posted in advancement of the self
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Is Foundation a Utopian vision?
Important: while I’m only talking about the Foundation books in vague details here, I will end up summarising a number of key points through the whole series. If you haven’t read them, and intend to, I recommend not reading this … Continue reading
Posted in Fiction
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Hi, I’m Graham and I like things
In my time in special-interest forums, I’ve come to learn that a “fan” of something is someone who doesn’t like it very much. This seems to crop up frequently in relation to long-running science fiction entertainment franchises, leading me to … Continue reading
Posted in star trek, whatevs
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On Nostalgia for Physical Media
While I have access to streaming services that offer most of the music that the labels the services deal with still publish, I also have a significant collection of music on physical media, and do most of my listening to … Continue reading
Posted in music
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The gaps between the processes
Knowledge management—not just in software engineering and not just digital knowledge management—has long had to account for tacit knowledge: the things that people know, but never say. “A lesser blog would reproduce the Donald Rumsfeld statement about known unknowns at … Continue reading
Posted in whatevs
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