APPropriate Behaviour
The book about all the things software writers do that aren't writing software.
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Category Archives: OOP
A two-dimensional dictionary
What? A thing I made has just been open-sourced by my employers at Agant: the AGTTwoDimensionalDictionary works a bit like a normal dictionary, except that the keys are CGPoints meaning we can find all the objects within a given rectangle. … Continue reading
Posted in code-level, iPad, iPhone, Mac, OOP, performance, software-engineering
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The Liskov Citation Principle
In her keynote speech at QCon London 2013 on The Power of Abstraction, Barbara Liskov referred to several papers contemporary with her work on abstract data types. I’ve collected these references and found links to free copies of the articles … Continue reading
Posted in code-level, documentation, OOP, software-engineering, Talk
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Does the history of making software exist?
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
Posted in advancement of the self, books, OOP, social-science, software-engineering
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Server-side Objective-C
Recently, Kevin Lawler posted an “Informal Technical Note” saying that Apple could clean up on licence sales if only they’d support web backend development. There are only two problems with this argument: it’s flawed, and the precondition probably won’t be … Continue reading
Posted in code-level, OOP, server, software-engineering, WebObjects
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Object-Oriented callback design
One of the early promises of object-oriented programming, encapsulated in the design of the Smalltalk APIs, was a reduction – or really an encapsulation – of the complexity of code. Many programmers believe that the more complex a method or … Continue reading
Posted in code-level, OOP, software-engineering
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Inheritance is old and busted
Back when I started reading about Object-Oriented Programming (which was when Java was new, I was using Delphi and maybe the ArcGIS scripting language, which also had OO features) the entire hotness was inheritance. Class hierarchies as complicated as biological … Continue reading
Posted in code-level, OOP, software-engineering
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On Null Objects
I’ve said before, NSNull is an anti-pattern. It’s nice that we have the nil object, which allows us to have a stand-in for any object that doesn’t do anything. Unfortunately, it’s not a universal stand-in. You can’t add nil to … Continue reading
Posted in code-level, OOP, software-engineering
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On community
This is a post that had been boiling for a while; I talked a little about the topic when I was in Appsterdam earlier this year, and had a few more thoughts which were completely supplanted and rearranged by watching
Posted in AAPL, advancement of the self, books, Business, iDeveloper.TV, iPhone, Mac, NSConf, OOP, Responsibility, software-engineering, Talk, WebObjects
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Coding. Standards.
I just realised that this month marks the 10th anniversary of my first payment for writing software (on, of all the weird things to be writing software on in 2002, a NeXTstation)! What have I learned from those ten years? … Continue reading
Posted in advancement of the self, Business, code-level, OOP, software-engineering
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Objective-C literals and subscripts
If you’re using clang from their website instead of sticking with Apple’s release, you get support for Objective-C literals and object subscripting. I thought I’d take the BrowseOverflow app and apply this new syntax to it. Notice that the code … Continue reading
Posted in code-level, OOP
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