We’re told that the core idea in computer programming is problem-solving. That one of the benefits of learning about computer programming (one that is not universally accepted) is gaining the skill of problem decomposition. If you look at real teaching of computing, it seems to have more to do with solution composition than problem decomposition. […]
I just want to point out that even the best of us aren’t doing what we expect the makers of acne creams to do. What we actually know about software development, and why we believe it’s true by Greg Wilson.
If you write a scholarly publication and cite another one, what you say about it depends on its mutability. An article or a book can be cited by saying “this publication I’m identifying here says this”. Maybe you have to version your claim: “the second edition of this publication says this”. They’re immutable. Even if […]
I’m apparently fascinated by the idea of defining curricula for learning programming. I’ve written about how we need to be careful what we try to pay forward from the way we learned in the past, and I’ve talked about how we do need to pay it forward so that the second hundred years see faster […]
However you slice the pie, we’re between two and three decades away from the centenary celebration for applied computing (which is of course significantly after theoretical or hypothetical advances made by the likes of Lovelace, Turing and others). You might count the anniversary of Colossus in 2043, the ENIAC in 2046, or maybe something earlier […]
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 be treading a fine line. The intended aim is to question accepted industry practice, and […]
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. I’ve had some experience of teaching programming: specifically, teaching C to undergraduates. Said undergraduates, as […]
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 to evolve software designs. However, in nature, elegance and symmetry play a crucial role in […]
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 abstract: Scientists spend an increasing amount of time building and using software. However, most scientists […]
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 whether results from academic software engineering are applicable to the work I do as a […]
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The book about all the things software writers do that aren't writing software.
