APPropriate Behaviour
The book about all the things software writers do that aren't writing software.
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Category Archives: tool-support
More Excel-lent Adventures
I previously wrote about Excel as the most successful IDE: Now what makes a spreadsheet better as a development environment is difficult to say; I’m unaware of anyone having researched it. That research is indeed extant, and the story is … Continue reading
Posted in code-level, tool-support
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The reasonable effectiveness of developer tools
In goals upon goals upon goals, I suggested that a fixation on developer tools is misplaced. This is not to say that developer tools are unhelpful, nor that they can’t have a significant impact on our work. Consider the following, … Continue reading
Posted in software-engineering, tool-support
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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
Posted in academia, advancement of the self, books, learning, Responsibility, software-engineering, tool-support
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Intuitive is the Enemy of Good
In the previous instalment, I discussed an interview in which Alan Kay maligned growth-restricted user interfaces. Here’s the quote again: There is the desire of a consumer society to have no learning curves. This tends to result in very dumbed-down … Continue reading
How much programming language is enough?
Many programmers have opinions on programming languages. Maybe, if I present an opinion on programming languages, I can pass off as a programmer. An old debate in psychology and anthropology is that of nature vs nurture, the discussion over which … Continue reading
Posted in code-level, nearly linguistics, tool-support
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On too much and too little
In the following text, remember that words like me or I are to be construed in the broadest possible terms. It’s easy to be comfortable with my current level of knowledge. Or perhaps it’s not the value, but the derivative … Continue reading
ClassBrowser: warts and all
I previously gave a sneak peak of ClassBrowser, a dynamic execution environment for Objective-C. It’s not anything like ready for general use (in fact it can’t really do ObjC very well at all), but it’s at the point where you … Continue reading
Posted in C++, code-level, Mac, OOP, software-engineering, TDD, tool-support
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A sneaky preview of ClassBrowser
Let me start with a few admissions. Firstly, I have been computering for a good long time now, and I still don’t really understand compilers. Secondly, work on my GNUstep Web side-project has tailed off for a while, because I … Continue reading
Posted in advancement of the self, C++, code-level, learning, OOP, software-engineering, tool-support
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Updating my ObjC web app on git push
I look at SignUp.woa running on my Ubuntu server, and it looks like this. That title text doesn’t quite look right. $ open -a TextWrangler Main.wo/Main.html $ make $ make check $ git add -A $ git commit -m “Use … Continue reading
Posted in gnustep, tool-support, UNIX, WebObjects
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Automated tests with the GNUstep test framework
Setup Of course, it’d be rude not to use a temperature converter as the sample project in a testing blog post. The only permitted alternative is a flawed bank account model. I’ll create a folder for my project, then inside … Continue reading
Posted in gnustep, TDD, tool-support
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