Author Archives: Graham

About Graham

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

Principled Lizards

Posted on 2014-03-09 by Graham

Sixty-five million years ago, there were many huge lizards. Most of them were really happy being lizards, and would spend all of the time they could doing lizardy things. Some wanted to be the biggest lizards, and grew so large … Continue reading →

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Messily Veneered C

Posted on 2014-02-25 by Graham

A recap: we saw that Model-View-Controller started life as Thing-Model-View-Editor, a way of approaching problems to design Smalltalk user interfaces. As Smalltalk-80 drifted off from its ivory tower, many Smalltalkers were using and talking about MVC, although any kind of … Continue reading →

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The Objective-C protocol naming trifecta

Posted on 2014-02-20 by Graham

Objective-C protocol names throughout history seem to fall into three distinct conventions: some are named after what a conforming object provides. Thus we have DBProperties, DBEntities, DBTypes and the like in Database Kit. others are named after what the object … Continue reading →

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ClassBrowser’s public face

Posted on 2014-02-19 by Graham

I made a couple of things: ClassBrowser discussion list The project website‘s source is now visible and MIT licensed I should’ve done both of these things at the beginning of the project. I believe that the fact I opened the … Continue reading →

Posted in Responsibility, software-engineering | Comments Off on ClassBrowser’s public face

Replacing the language

Posted on 2014-02-13 by Graham

Over the last few years, people have used the ObjC frameworks from TCL, Python, Perl and WebScript, Perl again, Perl, more Python, Ruby, Ruby, Ruby, Ruby, Java, Java, AppleScript, Smalltalk, C++, Pascal, Object Pascal, CLIPS, Common LISP, Nu, Eero, Modula-2, … Continue reading →

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Laggards don’t buy apps: devil’s advocate edition

Posted on 2014-02-08 by Graham

Silky-voiced star of podcasts and all-round nice developer person Brent Simmons just published a pair of articles on dropping support for older OS releases. His argument is reasonable, and is based on a number of axioms including this one: People … Continue reading →

Posted in Business, Responsibility | Comments Off on Laggards don’t buy apps: devil’s advocate edition

Missing Vital Content

Posted on 2014-02-05 by Graham

After reading Moderately Valuable Cliché, reader Nicholas Levin got in touch to recommend that I look at the back of my Smalltalk-80 books. Here’s the blue one. The first book mentioned in “Other books in the … Series” is the … Continue reading →

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Moderately Valuable Cliché

Posted on 2014-02-03 by Graham

In part 1 of the MVC story, I examined “Thing-Model-View-Editor”, a pattern[*] extracted by Trygve Reenskaug’s work in Smalltalk-76. By the time Smalltalk-80’s hot air balloon set sail from the ivory tower, there was already a structure called Model-View-Controller. Part … Continue reading →

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Set the settings set

Posted on 2014-01-29 by Graham

The worst method naming convention Object-Oriented programming is set{Thing}(). And no, C# doesn’t escape my ire for calling it Set{Thing}(), nor does Smalltalk for calling it {thing}:, though that does handily demonstrate how meaningless set is. OK, so set isn’t … Continue reading →

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Meaningless Vapid Catchphrase

Posted on 2014-01-21 by Graham

On the 4th December 2013, I said: Urge to search the archives for papers on Model-View-Controller and write an essay on its ever-changing meaning in programmer discourse. Do you have any idea how much work that is? I do, now. … Continue reading →

Posted in MVC, OOP | 2 Comments