A magazine about programmers, code, and society. Written by and for humans since 2018.
by Adrian Kosmaczewski, January 1st, 2024
Last September, we reviewed our first "coffee table book": a precious and unwieldy volume by Taschen called "The Computer", written by Jens Müller and Julius Wiedemann. At the end of that article, we mentioned another coffee table book, and it is about time we talk about it in detail. This month's Library entry is, then, "Home Computers: 100 Icons that Defined a Digital Generation" by Alex Wiltshire, featuring photographs by John Short, published by MIT Press in 2020.
by Adrian Kosmaczewski, November 6th, 2023
There is so much content about IBM online that it became quite complicated to pick an entry for the Vidéothèque section this month. We are talking about a company with monthly marketing budgets bigger in absolute numbers than the average yearly payroll of a small or medium enterprise; and with more than 100 years of history, there are quite a few stories to be told about it.
by Adrian Kosmaczewski, September 4th, 2023
None of the previous 48 entries in the Library section of this magazine have dealt with what is commonly referred to as a "coffee table book". Today we rectify such omission by showcasing a massive, recent, and by all standards, very desirable book from Taschen, the legendary German publishing house.
by Adrian Kosmaczewski, February 6th, 2023
What happened in the world in 1993? Czechoslovakia separated in a peaceful process into two countries. Bill Clinton became the 42nd president of the USA. A bomb detonated in the basement of the World Trade Center. Janet Reno became the first female Attorney General of the USA. Jiang Zemin became President of the People's Republic of China. The WHO declared tuberculosis a global emergency. A "fan" stabbed Monica Seles in the back. Crowds were protesting against Slobodan Milošević in Belgrade. Andrew Miles solved Fermat's Last Theorem. Miguel Indurain won the Tour de France. The Maastricht Treaty took effect, creating the European Union. And finally, the Hubble Space Telescope took pictures without suffering from myopia.
by Adrian Kosmaczewski, January 2nd, 2023
We have often said in the pages of this magazine that some books carry with them the Zeitgeist of their era. Examples are Bruce Tate's "Beyond Java," Joe Armstrong's "Programming Erlang," and Toby Segaran's "Programming Collective Intelligence." Such books have a tremendous impact upon publication, freezing in words not only a valuable body of knowledge, but also the spirit and promise of a new direction for the industry. Even if the APIs they describe become obsolete over time (which is mainly unavoidable), they remain as hallmarks of an era, valuable witnesses of the preoccupations and needs of practitioners at the time of their publication.
by Adrian Kosmaczewski, November 7th, 2022
One of the most visible side-effects of specialization is that we miss on interesting things existing in other technical galaxies. This is one of the main goals of this magazine; to point to stars in other locations of the sky and let people discover amazing new people. If you are not in the web, JavaScript, or Ruby galaxies, you might have missed on Gary Bernhardt, and that would be too bad.
Western culture has long been fascinated with what the French call "Extrême-Orient"; since the times of Marco Polo, most probably since biblical times. We (the editors of a magazine that is, after all, a pure product of Western civilization) assign certain qualities to the thinking patterns of those regions: wisdom, calmness, thoughtfulness, and reflection. Eastern philosophy is often analyzed in counterpoint, in a tangential or even orthogonal fashion from its western counterpart: Confucius versus Aristotle; reason versus faith; extrovert versus introvert; yin versus yang; pandas versus grizzlies; Bruce Lee versus Chuck Norris.
by Adrian Kosmaczewski, September 5th, 2022
The first video of this series will feature none other than Bret Victor in one of his most memorable talks. We have already discussed Bret in a previous article about Smalltalk, where we named him one of the most influential figures in that galaxy. This video, however, shows that his light shines much brighter than that.
January 3rd, 2022
Welcome to the fortieth issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, dedicated to the subject of Skeuomorphism. In this edition, Adrian calls for no more flat user interfaces, Graham argues that skeuomorphism is a necessity, and in the Library section, Adrian reviews "Designing Interfaces" by Jenifer Tidwell.
by Graham Lee, February 1st, 2021
You may be worried that I am going to talk about an author of books that are not about programming, and you are correct and incorrect. Correct, in that Hofstadter's books are not about programming (the intellectually hollow like to claim that they are not about anything at all, or that if you think you know what they are about then you did not understand them; this is untrue). Incorrect, in that Hofstadter's books and computer programs themselves are about the same thing.