Author Archives: Graham

About Graham

I make it faster and easier for you to create high-quality code.

Two ways of thinking

Posted on 2017-07-26 by Graham

I’ve used this idea in conversations for years, and can’t find a post on it, which I find surprising but there you go. There are, broadly speaking, two different ways to look at programming languages. And I think that these … Continue reading →

Posted in code-level, social-science | Leave a comment

If Object-Oriented Programming were announced today

Posted on 2017-07-22 by Graham

Here’s an idea: the current backlash against OOP is actually because people aren’t doing OOP, they’re doing whatever they were doing before OOP. But they’re calling it OOP, because the people who were promoting OOP wanted them to believe that … Continue reading →

Posted in FP, OOP | Leave a comment

Open Source: because I got mine, so fuck you

Posted on 2017-07-18 by Graham

The Free Software movement has at its core the idea that people have the freedom to use, study, share, and improve the software on their computers. The modern developer “ecosystem” has co-opted this to create a two-tier society: a developer … Continue reading →

Posted in freesoftware | 6 Comments

Technical debt and jury service

Posted on 2017-07-11 by Graham

We have the idea that in addition to the product development backlogs for our teams, there’s an engineering backlog where technical debt paydown, process/tooling improvements, and other sitewide engineering concerns get recorded. Working on them is done in time that … Continue reading →

Posted in software-engineering | 1 Comment

The worst phrase in software marketing

Posted on 2017-07-06 by Graham

“Rewritten from the ground up”. Please. Your old version mostly worked, except for those few corner cases that I’d learned how to work around. Now I don’t know whether the stuff that did work does work now, and I don’t … Continue reading →

Posted in Business | 2 Comments

Culture Smell

Posted on 2017-06-09 by Graham

A phrase I used in a discussion today. Developers are familiar with “code smells”, aspects of a codebase that aren’t necessarily wrong but do make you take a deeper look. By analogy, a culture smell surprising, but not necessarily wrong, … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Literate Programming with LibreOffice

Posted on 2017-05-21 by Graham

This post comes in the form of an OpenDocumentFormat document containing a program that can extract programs from ODF documents, including the program contained in this document.

Posted in code-level, software-engineering, tool-support | 1 Comment

Prototypical object-oriented programming

Posted on 2017-05-12 by Graham

Some people think that the notion of classes is intrinsic to object-oriented programming. Bertrand Meyer even wrote a textbook about OOP called A Touch of Class. But back in the 1980s, Alan Borning and others were trying to teach object-oriented … Continue reading →

Posted in javascript, OOP | 1 Comment

In defence of assertions

Posted on 2017-05-10 by Graham

The year is 2017 and people are still recommending processing out assertions from release builds. many assertions are short tests (whether or not that’s a good thing): this variable now has a value, this number is now greater than zero), … Continue reading →

Posted in code-level | 1 Comment

In defence of large teams

Posted on 2017-05-07 by Graham

Seen on the twitters: 1) Bad reasons why tech startups have incredibly large mobile teams even though from an engineering perspective they don’t need it. This is the No True Scotsman fallacy, as no true software department needs more than, … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment