Author Archives: Graham

About Graham

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

I just updated Appropriate Behaviour

Posted on 2013-02-23 by Graham

The new release of Appropriate Behaviour—the book about things programmers should do that aren’t programming—is now up. The most obvious, and most awesome, change in this update is a fabulous new cover, designed by Sebastian Hermida of leanpubcovers.com. Should you … Continue reading →

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Happy Birthday, Objective-C!

Posted on 2013-02-22 by Graham

OK, I have to admit that I actually missed the party. Brad Cox first described his “Object-Oriented pre-compiler”, OOPC, in The January 1983 issue of ACM SIGPLAN Notices. This describes the Object Oriented Pre-Compiler, OOPC, a language and a run-time … Continue reading →

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Does the history of making software exist?

Posted on 2013-02-09 by Graham

A bit of a repeated theme in the construction of APPropriate Behaviour has been that I’ve tried to position certain terms or concepts in their historical context, and found it difficult, or impossible to do so with sufficient rigour. There’s … Continue reading →

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An observation designed to aid the reading of books on software

Posted on 2013-02-04 by Graham

Wherever a book on writing software describes the 1968 NATO conference in Garmisch on Software Engineering, consider whether the clarity of the argument can be improved by adding the following parenthetical clause: […], a straw man version of an otherwise … Continue reading →

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Anyone Can Write A Manifesto And You Can Too!™

Posted on 2013-02-03 by Graham

Over a small number of years, I have helped to write some software. During this time I have come to value: Solving problems over rejecting what has passed before Solving problems over congratulating ourselves Solving problems over creating problems Solving … Continue reading →

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Talking about talking

Posted on 2013-02-01 by Graham

I recently gave a talk to my colleagues about giving talks. Here is an annotated collection of the notes I made in preparation. – What do you want the audience to get out of the talk? As you’re constructing your … Continue reading →

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Detecting overflows, undefined behaviour and other nasties

Posted on 2013-01-30 by Graham

You will remember that a previous post discussed what happens when you add one to an integer, and that the answer isn’t always obvious. Indeed, the answer isn’t always defined. As it happens, there are plenty of weird cases that … Continue reading →

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An open letter to Xcode

Posted on 2013-01-20 by Graham

The post below has been filed verbatim as an Apple Developer Tools bug report with ID 13051064. Dear Xcode, imagine that you had a combine harvester. Only, this combine harvester, instead of having a hopper into which the winnowed wheat … Continue reading →

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Retiring the “Apple developers are insular” meme

Posted on 2013-01-13 by Graham

There’s an old trope used in discussions of Mac and iOS developers, that says they’re too inward-looking. They only think about software in ways that have been “blessed” by Apple, their platform vendor. I’m pretty sure that I’ve used this … Continue reading →

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What happens when you add one to an integer?

Posted on 2013-01-10 by Graham

It depends. You saw in the previous post that there are plenty of different integer types, some with known sizes and some where the size is set by the implementation. Well for each size of integer type there are two … Continue reading →

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