APPropriate Behaviour
The book about all the things software writers do that aren't writing software.
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Author Archives: Graham
The paradox of scripting
But how can scripting be dead? There’s bash, and powershell, and ruby, and…even Perl is still popular among sysadmins. There’s never been a better time to be a programmer or other IT professional trying to automate a task. True, but … Continue reading
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The death of scripting
Back in the day, when programmers knew that they couldn’t possibly think of everything somebody might want to do with a computer, there were scripts. If somebody could find enough of the pieces of the thing that they wanted to … Continue reading
Posted in architecture of sorts, script
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On having things to say
I enjoyed Jaimee’s discussion of preparing her public talks, and realised that my approach has moved in a different way. I’ve probably talked about this before but I’ve also changed how I go about it. This is my technique, particularly … Continue reading
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On running out of words
John Gruber’s subscription to Wiktionary expired: At just 20 percent of unit sales, Apple isn’t even close to a monopoly. At 92 percent profit share, they have a market dominance that rivals any actual monopoly the tech industry has ever … Continue reading
Posted in AAPL, Business
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Imperative Programming in Swift
A cliche in programming is that certain ways of writing programs make it possible to “reason about” code. So it should be possible to form an argument that proceeds from some axioms to a conclusion about the code we’re looking … Continue reading
Posted in FP, IP
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Honestly, this next post will take a while.
Functional Programming in Object-Oriented Programming in Functional Programming in Swift
The objects that I’ve been building up over the last few posts have arbitrarily broad behaviours. They can respond to any selector drawn from the set of all possible strings. As with all art, beauty is produced by imposing constraints. … Continue reading
Posted in FP, OOP
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Classes in objects in object-oriented programming in functional programming in Swift
So far, Objective-Swift objects have used prototypical inheritance, in which they supply some methods but also know about another object to which they can forward messages they don’t understand themselves. This pattern is used in languages like Self, JavaScript and … Continue reading
Posted in FP, OOP
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Mutable objects in immutable objects in object-oriented programming in functional programming in Swift
I didn’t realise this at the time, the previous entry wasn’t the last Objective-Swift post. The inheritance mechanism in ObjS is prototypical, meaning that an object inherits from a single other object rather than getting its behaviour from a class. … Continue reading
Posted in FP, OOP
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This gist shows the result of doing the self-threading talked about at the end of the last post. Each method implementation takes an object pointer and a selector name, just like in the real world. That’s enough Objective-Swift for me. … Continue reading
