APPropriate Behaviour
The book about all the things software writers do that aren't writing software.
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Author Archives: Graham
An acceptable tool It’s easy to forget that adequacy is, well, adequate. It’s easy to go all-in on making some code structure perfect, when good enough would be good enough.
Beware the IDEs
I recently had the opportunity to talk with a couple of software project managers from IBM. That company is of a kind that I have never worked at, and many of the companies I have worked at are of kinds … Continue reading
Posted in tool-support
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Hiding behind messages
A problem I think about every so often is how to combine the software design practice of hiding implementations behind interfaces with the engineering practice of parallel execution. What are the trade-offs between making parallelism explicit and information hiding? Where … Continue reading
Posted in architecture of sorts, code-level, OOP
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It depends? It depends.
Sometimes you ask a question which has a small collection of actionable answers: yes or no. You ask someone who should be able to give that yes or no answer, and they go for the third: it depends. Maybe they … Continue reading
Posted in learning
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GNU Terry Pratchett
(post-hoc prescript: I admit to being in two minds about sharing this post. Name-dropping can be the ultimate in reflected vanity: I have worth because I knew this worthy person. I title it about them, but we both know it’s … Continue reading
Posted in whatevs
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Linus’s Bystanders
For some reason, when Eric S. Raymond wanted to make a point about the “bazaar” model of open source software development, he named it after someone else. Thus we have Linus’s Law: Linus was directly aiming to maximize the number … Continue reading
Posted in social-science
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Inspired by Swift
Gulliver meets the Oopers Lemuel Gulliver’s world was black. No light, no sound, infinite darkness and solitude. Am I dead?, he asked himself. No, surely not. He opened his eyes. Still, everything remained black. My God, I am dead! Lemuel … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
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Fun and games (with rewritten rules) in Objective-C
An object-oriented programming environment is not a set of rules. Programs do not need to be constructed according to the rules supplied by the environment. An object-oriented environment includes tools for constructing new rules, and programs can use these to … Continue reading
Posted in code-level, OOP
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Objective-Curry
Sadly it’s not called Schoenfinkeling, but that’s the name of the person who noticed that there’s no reason to ever have a function with more than one argument. What you think is a function with two arguments is actually a … Continue reading
Posted in code-level, Foundation, OOP
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A subtle [mis]understanding of monads
As I said when talking about Learning Phases, one of the things that happens when I’m trying to learn a new thing is that I build an analogy in terms of something I do understand. This can be dangerous when … Continue reading
Posted in FP, OOP
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