A magazine about programmers, code, and society. Written by and for humans since 2018.
by Adrian Kosmaczewski, February 2nd, 2026
Most people traverse this industry in silence, duly writing, debugging, and deploying their code in whatever way ensures their salary or stock option grants; some others become unexpected stars in a firmament that would otherwise be dull and uneventful. And since in this magazine we celebrate not only the technological but also the artistic, we have the honor and privilege of reminding every serious (ahem) software developer that being silly and childish and playful is a valid choice. Today's Library entry, precisely, falls in this category.
by Adrian Kosmaczewski, November 3rd, 2025
How did companies sell Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) to the masses back in the early 1990s, during the "Peak Of Inflated Expectations" of the OOP hype cycle? We have already seen such an example in the Vidéothèque section of this magazine, in which Steve Jobs would demonstrate how to build an application using objects on a NeXT computer. In this month’s entry, we will learn about OOP concepts from one of Borland’s founders and chairmen, Philippe Kahn himself.
by Adrian Kosmaczewski, June 2nd, 2025
Among the many documents available at the Computer History Museum website there is an interesting artifact: a commercial brochure published in 1957 by the Remington Rand UNIVAC, "a division of Sperry Rand Corporation", titled "introducing a new language for automatic programming". In it, we learn about the advantages of the new (at the time) FLOW-MATIC programming language, the brainchild of United States Navy Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper.
There are a lot of different things we could have talked about in the Library section of an edition dedicated to compilers; one obvious choice would have been to talk about the quintessential compiler theory book, the 1986 "Dragon Book" also known as "Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools" by Alfred V. Aho, Ravi Sethi, and Jeffrey D. Ullman. As excellent and Wikipedia-worthy as this one is, that is not the book we will talk about here.
by Adrian Kosmaczewski, March 3rd, 2025
Paraphrasing a well-known software mogul who shall remain nameless in the pages of this magazine, insecure software is eating the world. The reasons of such sad state of things are varied and range from social to economic; the technological aspect is usually the one that concerns me the least. In this sea of unusable things and insecure networks, there is a “subculture” (a horrible word, but bear with me) of highly skilled individuals who teach each other how broken those things are. And yes, they have their own magazines to spread the word.
by Adrian Kosmaczewski, July 1st, 2024
Back in the 1980s and 1990s, one of the most appropriate locations in Buenos Aires to find international magazines was the quintessential Calle Florida. In those huge newsstands next to the corner with Avenida Corrientes one could find incunabula ranging from the September issue of Vogue to the latest edition of Paris Match. Among those, every so often my programmer self would jump in joy to find some lost computer magazine; and by far the one that made me the happiest to unearth was, without any doubt, Dr. Dobb's Journal.
May 6th, 2024
Welcome to the sixty-eighth issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, about Design. In this edition, we analyze the impossible dialogue between graphic designers and developers; in the Library section, we review "Design for Hackers" by David Kadavy, and in our Vidéothèque section, we watch "Helvetica" by Gary Hustwit.
by Adrian Kosmaczewski, April 1st, 2024
Text is a surprisingly dense medium. Despite what the common pretension of online folklore states, I consider the adage, "an image is worth a thousand words" to be a blatant slur, and this magazine is my feeble attempt at demonstrating such a thesis. Text is powerful, deep, and intricate; if anything because it can be misinterpreted and reinterpreted a piacere.
How do you start learning about computers? The opinions about this particular subject have a cardinality close to the number of computer scientists or IT professionals on the planet. Everyone will have their own opinion, but a single book published in 2000 might have helped everyone reach an agreement, and that is no small feat.
by Adrian Kosmaczewski, January 1st, 2024
The same way kids are addicted to TikTok nowadays, I was addicted to TV as a kid. In the place and time of my teenage years, that is Argentina during the 1980s, it was the times of hyperinflation and eternal crisis (which begs the question: has anything changed in forty years?) Such a tense situation also meant that there was not much content on the telly about a subject that I was definitely interested in since a young age: computers. I mean, you could barely afford food, so, understandably enough, computing was scarce. Maslow's pyramid, yadda yadda.