Monthly Archives: October 2017

In which new developer tools are dull

Posted on 2017-10-30 by Graham

Over on lobste.rs I said that I don’t hold out much hope for another “blue plane” style event in developer tools. In one of Alan Kay’s presentations, he referred to the ordinary way of things as the pink plane, and … Continue reading →

Posted in software-engineering, tool-support | Leave a comment

Bottom-up teaching

Posted on 2017-10-22 by Graham

We’re told that the core idea in computer programming is problem-solving. That one of the benefits of learning about computer programming (one that is not universally accepted) is gaining the skill of problem decomposition. If you look at real teaching … Continue reading →

Posted in academia, architecture of sorts, edjercashun | Leave a comment

Why I don’t have a favourite programming language

Posted on 2017-10-11 by Graham

This is my take on Ilya Sher’s similar post, though from a different context. He is mainly interested in systems programming, I have mostly written user apps and backend services, and also some developer tools. I originally thought that I … Continue reading →

Posted in tool-support | Leave a comment

Free Software should welcome contributions by Apple, Google

Posted on 2017-10-06 by Graham

It started with a toot from the FSF: Freedom means not #madebygoogle or #madebyapple, it means #madebythousandsoffreesoftwarehackers #GNU This post is an expansion on my reply: @fsf as an FSF Associate I’m happy to use software made by Google or … Continue reading →

Posted in AAPL, freesoftware | Leave a comment

Recommend me some books or articles

Posted on 2017-10-05 by Graham

I’ve been looking for something to read on these topics, can you help? a history of the Unix wars (the ‘workstation’ period involving Sun, HP, Apollo, DEC, IBM, NeXT and SGI primarily, but really everything starting from AT&T up to … Continue reading →

Posted in books, learning | 3 Comments