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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.
Author Archives: Graham
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
Set the settings set
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
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
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The First Flaw
As she left her desk at the grandiosely-named United States Robotics, Susan reflected on her relationship with the engineering team she was about to meet. Many of its members were juvenile and frivolous in her opinion, and she refused to … Continue reading
Posted in Fiction, Responsibility, social-science
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It’s about solving problems
As ever, there’s a touchstone issue on the programmers’ corner of the intarwebs (the programmers’ corner is actually the same intarwebs everyone else is using, just we model it with geometry so it can have a corner). Here it is: … Continue reading
Posted in learning, Responsibility, TDD
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Programming as a societal roadblock
Introduction People who make software are instigators of and obstacles to social interactions. We are secondarily technologists, in that we apply technology to enable and block these transactions. This article explores the results. Programmers as arbiters of death I would … Continue reading
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