APPropriate Behaviour
The book about all the things software writers do that aren't writing software.
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Tag Archives: History of Software Engineering
Applications and Spelling of Boole
While Alan Turing is regarded by many as the grandfather of Artificial Intelligence, George Boole should be entitled to some claim to that epithet too. His Investigation of the Laws of Thought is nothing other than a systematisation of “those … Continue reading
Runtime verification in Erlang by using contracts
About this paper Runtime verification in Erlang by using contracts, L.-A. Fredlund et al, presented at WFLP 2018. Notes Spoiler alert, but the conclusion to my book OOP the Easy Way is that we should have independently-running objects, like we … Continue reading
Hyperloops for our minds
We were promised a bicycle for our minds. What we got was more like a highly-efficient, privately run mass transit tunnel. It takes us where it’s going, assuming we pay the owner. Want to go somewhere else? Tough. Can’t afford … Continue reading
Ratio
The web has a weird history with comments. I have a book called Zero Comments, a critique of blog culture from 2008. It opens by quoting from a 2005 post from a now defunct website, stodge.org. The Wayback Machine does … Continue reading
Mach and Matchmaker: kernel and language support for object-oriented distributed systems
About this paper Mach and Matchmaker: kernel and language support for object-oriented distributed systems , Michael B. Jones and Richard F. Rashid, from the proceedings of OOPSLA ’86. Notes Yes, 1986 was a long time ago, but the topics of … Continue reading
Posted in academia, architecture of sorts, OOP
Tagged History of Software Engineering
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The balloon goes up
To this day, many Smalltalk projects have a hot air balloon in their logo. These reference the cover of the issue of Byte Magazine in which Smalltalk-80 was shared with the wider programming community. Modern Smalltalks all have a lot … Continue reading
Why 80?
80 characters per line is a standard worth sticking to, even today. OK, why? Well, back up. Let’s examine the axioms. Is 80 characters per line a standard? Not really, it’s a convention. IBM cards (which weren’t just made by … Continue reading
The Fragile Manifesto
A lot of what I’ve been reading and thinking about of late is about the agile backlash. More speed, lower velocity reflects on IT teams pursuing “deliver more/newer IT” at the cost of “help the company achieve its mission”. Grooming … Continue reading
On the continuous history of approximation
The Difference Engine – the Charles Babbage machine, not the steampunk novel – is a device for finding successive solutions to polynomial equations by adding up the differences introduced by each term between the successive input values. This sounds like … Continue reading
The ABC of Software Engineering Research
About this paper The ABC of Software Engineering Research by Klaas-Jan Stol and Brian Fitzgerald, published October 2018. See link for full citation. Notes There are too many ways in which terms describing research methods in software engineering get used, … Continue reading
