APPropriate Behaviour
The book about all the things software writers do that aren't writing software.
FSF
Author Archives: Graham
More Excel-lent Adventures
I previously wrote about Excel as the most successful IDE: Now what makes a spreadsheet better as a development environment is difficult to say; I’m unaware of anyone having researched it. That research is indeed extant, and the story is … Continue reading
Posted in code-level, tool-support
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What it takes to “win” a discussion
You may have been to some kind of debate club at school, or at least had a debate in a class. If so, the debate you had was probably a competitive debate, and went something along these lines (causality is … Continue reading
Posted in learning
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APPosite Concerns
I’ve started another book project: APPosite Concerns is in the same series as, and is somehow a sequel to, APPropriate Behaviour. So now I just have one question to ask. What is going to be in the book? This question … Continue reading
Posted in books
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Apple’s Watch and Jony’s Compelling Beginning
There are a whole lot of constraints that go into designing something. Here are the few I could think of in a couple of minutes: what people already understand about their interactions with things what people will discover about their … Continue reading
Posted in UI
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Sitting on the Sidelines
Thank you, James Hague, for your article You Can’t Sit on the Sidelines and Become a Philosopher. I got a lot out of reading it, because I identified myself in it. Specifically in this paragraph: There’s another option, too: you … Continue reading
Why is programming so hard?
I have been reflecting recently on what it was like to learn to program. The problem is, I don’t clearly remember: I do remember that there was a time when I was no good at it. When I could type … Continue reading
Posted in edjercashun
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Programming, maths and the other things
Sarah Mei argues that programming is not math, arguing instead that programming is language. I don’t think it’s hard to see the truth in the first part, though due to geopolitical influences on my personality I’d make the incrementally longer … Continue reading
Posted in philosophy after a fashion
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Intellectual property and software: the nuclear option
There are many problems that arise from thinking about the ownership of software and its design. Organisations like the Free Software Foundation and Open Source Initiative take advantage of the protections of copyright of source code – presumed to be … Continue reading
Posted in economics, IANAL
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On Mental Health
This post has been a while in the writing, I suppose waiting for the perfect time to publish it. The two things that happened today to make me finally commit it to electrons were the news about Robin Williams, and … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
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Contractually-obligated testing
About a billion years ago, Bertrand Meyer (he of Open-Closed Principle fame) introduced a programming language called Eiffel. It had a feature called Design by Contract, that let you define constraints that your program had to adhere to in execution. … Continue reading
Posted in architecture of sorts, code-level, OOP, TDD
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