Category Archives: academia

Preparing for Computing’s Big One-Oh-Oh

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 … Continue reading

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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

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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

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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

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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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