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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
On what makes a “good” comment
I have previously discussed the readability of code: The author must decide who will read the code, and how to convey the important information to those readers. The reader must analyse the code in terms of how it satisfies this … Continue reading
Posted in documentation
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Did that restructuring work actually help?
Before getting into the meat of this post, I’d like to get into the meta of this post. This essay, and I imagine many in this blog [Ed: by which I meant the blog this has been imported from], will … Continue reading
Posted in academia
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Teaching Programming to People. It’s easy, right?
I was doing a literature search for a different subject (which will appear soon), and found a couple of articles related to teaching programming. I don’t know if you remember when you learnt programming, but you probably found it hard. … Continue reading
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Elegant Object-oriented Software Design via Interactive, Evolutionary Computation
The abstract of this paper from the ArXiv had me concerned: Design is fundamental to software development but can be demanding to perform. Thus to assist the software designer, evolutionary computing is being increasingly applied using machine-based, quantitative fitness functions … Continue reading
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On Scientific Computing
Or: Not everyone works the way you work Currently doing the rounds on Twitter is a paper from the ArXiV called Best Practices for Scientific Computing—a paper with 13 authors and 6 pages,including a page-long collection of references. Here’s the … Continue reading
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Representativeness in Software Engineering Research
The first paragraph describes the context of this post in relation to the blog on which it originally appeared, not blog.securemacprogramming.com. For this post, I wanted to go a little bit meta. One focus of this blog will be on … Continue reading
Posted in academia, software-engineering
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Garbage-collected Objective-C
When was a garbage collector added to Objective-C? If you follow Apple’s work with the language, you might be inclined to believe that it was in 2008 when AutoZone was added as part of Objective-C 2.0 (the AutoZone collector has … Continue reading
Posted in academia, architecture of sorts, gnustep, iPad, iPhone, Mac, OOP
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Programming Literate Manifesto
Late last year, I decided to set up a second blog, focusing on exploring the world of academic literature relevant to our work as people who make software. The tone and content was very different to what I usually write … Continue reading
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How I got root on my University’s UNIX network
Back when I was a student, the way you talked to other people on the internet was via Usenet. The language we used, while still called “English”, was slightly different from the language we use today. One small example of … Continue reading
Posted in UNIX
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Compatibility
Solaris 10, scheduled to be supported until January, 2021, can still run BSD binaries built for Solaris 1 (a retroactive name for SunOS 4.1), released in 1991. I wonder for how long the apps we wrote for our iPhones back … Continue reading
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