Category Archives: code-level

Beginner thoughts

Posted on 2018-10-20 by Graham

Back story: my period of walkabout, in which I went to see the rest of the computing world beyond Apple land, started in November 2014. This was shortly after Swift’s introduction at WWDC 2014. It ended in October 2018, by … Continue reading →

Posted in code-level, edjercashun, Swift | Tagged | 2 Comments

On null

Posted on 2018-05-13 by Graham

I’ve had an interesting conversation on the topic of null over the last few days, spurred by the logical disaster of null. I disagreed with the statement in the post that: Logically-speaking, there is no such thing as Null This … Continue reading →

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In defense of `id`

Posted on 2018-03-06 by Graham

Something you can’t see about my dotSwift talk on OOP in FP in Swift is that to make the conference more interesting while the AV was set up for the next speaker, Daniel Steinberg invited me over to a side … Continue reading →

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machoo – Object-Oriented Programming in Object-Oriented Programming in the GNU HURD

Posted on 2018-02-03 by Graham

For the last few weeks, my when-I-get-to-it project has been machoo, which is sort of an object-oriented system on the HURD but mostly an excuse to learn about how Mach messaging works. I decided to build a Smalltalk-style “give me … Continue reading →

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Reasoning about reasoning about software

Posted on 2017-12-21 by Graham

Functional programmers like to claim that you can’t reason about mutable state programs. Some thoughts: the first half of the book A Discipline of Programming by Edsger W. Dijkstra tells you how to do it. That half of the book … Continue reading →

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Falsehoods programmers believe about programming

Posted on 2017-12-10 by Graham

There is no ethical impact of my job; I build technological systems and it’s up to others how they use them. Software is a purely technical discipline. There is some innate affinity for computer programming which you must be born … Continue reading →

Posted in code-level | 14 Comments

Give me an S

Posted on 2017-09-21 by Graham

S – I can find the thing I need to change. O – My change will either be an extension or a replacement. L – My replacement or extension needs to be a drop-in change. I – Here’s what my … Continue reading →

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Two ways of thinking

Posted on 2017-07-26 by Graham

I’ve used this idea in conversations for years, and can’t find a post on it, which I find surprising but there you go. There are, broadly speaking, two different ways to look at programming languages. And I think that these … Continue reading →

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Literate Programming with LibreOffice

Posted on 2017-05-21 by Graham

This post comes in the form of an OpenDocumentFormat document containing a program that can extract programs from ODF documents, including the program contained in this document.

Posted in code-level, software-engineering, tool-support | 1 Comment

In defence of assertions

Posted on 2017-05-10 by Graham

The year is 2017 and people are still recommending processing out assertions from release builds. many assertions are short tests (whether or not that’s a good thing): this variable now has a value, this number is now greater than zero), … Continue reading →

Posted in code-level | 1 Comment