Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programmers

Nvidia’s ambitions are scarcely hidden. Once it owns Arm it will withdraw its licensing agreements from its competitors, notably Intel and Huawei, and after July next year take the rump of Arm to Silicon Valley

This tech giant up for sale is a homegrown miracle – it must be saved for Britain

There are two different questions of fairness when it comes to the App Store rules. Apple always spin it to mean “these rules are applied fairly”, which is certainly not true. Putting aside questions of why Netflix get to do things Hey don’t, it’s pretty obvious that the rules include “don’t make apps in these spaces where Apple has apps” that don’t apply to Apple. It’s also clear that nobody in the App Store team is rules lawyering Apple apps on the rest of the rules, either.

But all of that ignores the larger question, “are these rules fair?”

NeXT marketed their workstations by letting Sun convince people they wanted a workstation, then trying to convince customers (who were already impressed by Sun) that their workstation was better.

As part of this, they showed how much better the development tools were, in this very long reality TV infomercial.

On the topic of the Apple II, remember that MOS was owned by Commodore Business Machines, a competitor of Apple’s, throughout the lifetime of the computer. Something to bear in mind while waiting to see where ARM Holdings lands.

An eight-year-old model of iPad is now considered vintage and obsolete. For comparison, the Apple ][ was made from 1977-1993 (16 years) and the January 1983 Apple //e would’ve had exactly the same software support as the final model sold in November 1993, or the compatibility cards for Macintosh sold from 1991 onwards.

The problem with musicians these days is they don’t work hard enough to make Daniel Ek, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai and Jeff Bezos rich.

Some programming languages have a final keyword, making types closed for extension and open for modification.

I’ve been playing a lot of CD32, and would just like to mention how gloriously 90s it is. This is the startup chime. For comparison, the Interstellar News chime from Babylon 5.

Sure beats these.

Don’t like a new way of working? Just point out the absurdity of suggesting that the old way was broken:

Somehow, the microservices folks have failed to notice all that software that was in fact delivered as monoliths.

What the Rust Evangelism Strike Force doesn’t realise is that we’ve spent decades successfully building C programs that don’t dereference the NULL pointer.

This is a sort of “[C|Monoliths] considered harmless” statement. Yes, it’s possible to do it that way, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t problems, or at least trade-offs. “C considered harmless” is as untrue and unhelpful as “C considered harmful”; what we want is “C considered alongside alternatives”.

I frequently see posts/articles/screeds asking why people don’t contribute to open source. If it’s important that recipients of open source software contribute upstream, and you are angry when they don’t, why use licences like MIT, Apache, GPL or BSD that don’t require upstream collaboration?

Back in the day, Apple released their public source code under version 1 of the Apple Public Source Licence, which required users who changed the source to fill in a form notifying Apple of their changes. You could do the same, and not be angry.