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Chiron Codex: helping software engineers become centaurs. APPropriate Behaviour
The book about all the things software writers do that aren't writing software.
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Author Archives: Graham
Software, Science?
Is there any science in software making? Does it make sense to think of software making as scientific? Would it help if we could? Hold on, just what is science anyway? Good question. The medieval French philosopher-monk Buridan said that … Continue reading
Posted in advancement of the self, learning, social-science, software-engineering
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Inside-Out Apps
This article is based on a talk I gave at mdevcon 2014. The talk also included a specific example to demonstrate the approach, but was otherwise a presentation of the following argument. You probably read this blog because you write … Continue reading
Posted in architecture of sorts, MVC, OOP, ruby, software-engineering
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Principled Lizards
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
Posted in advancement of the self
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Messily Veneered C
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
The Objective-C protocol naming trifecta
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
Posted in OOP
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ClassBrowser’s public face
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
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Replacing the language
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
Posted in code-level
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Laggards don’t buy apps: devil’s advocate edition
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
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Missing Vital Content
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
Moderately Valuable Cliché
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
