Every so often this magazine drifts away from the coverage of classic programming titles because its main objective is to stretch the brains of software practitioners towards other areas of knowledge, such as design, sociology, or science. Business books are one such area, and we should be covering more of those. But today we will talk about one that could rightfully be called the most important business book of the 21st century so far.
It would be unwise and useless to try to summarize in a thousand words the immense contributions of Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare, also known as Tony Hoare (I suppose we are all good friends in this industry) or, with a more Tolkien feeling, as C. A. R. Hoare. I will settle for “Sir Tony Hoare” in this article; familiar yet respectful enough.
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.
Most software developers are ejected from academia into the jaws of the business of software with little preparation. Of course, they are equipped with good enough knowledge about some more or less relevant programming language, and maybe some algorithm, hopefully including the venerable linked list reversion, indispensable to pass the dreaded coding interview. But not much more.
Few ecosystems react as viscerally and as brutally to "bad" visual design than whatever Apple has brought into the world. From the first Macintosh to the latest Vision Pro, the whole idea of making apps for Apple platforms involves, hopefully sooner than later, a severe and serious evaluation of style along with functionality.
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.
A quick review of previous entries in the Library section of this magazine shows that it does not feature any book from The Pragmatic Programmers, for no other reason than gross oversight. We have discussed books from MIT Press, Addison-Wesley, O'Reilly, and many other publishing houses, and now it is time to solve this issue. This month we will elaborate on "Pragmatic Version Control Using Git", a 2008 book by Travis Swicegood.
Here is a confession. The first drafts of this issue of De Programmatica Ipsum were written under the name "Structured Programming". Understandably enough, the news of Niklaus Wirth's passing triggered a prompt renaming and the choice of a somewhat narrower focus. However, Pascal's rise in popularity during the 1970s and 1980s cannot be explained unless we elaborate on Structured Programming, and this month's Library book is among the most important ones ever written about the subject.
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.
The news of a software patch uploaded to the Voyager probes reminded me of a 1980 book telling precisely the story of how their journey began 46 years ago. When said book hit the publishing press, Voyager 1 had just finished its flyby of Saturn, a planet which Voyager 2 was about to survey a few months later. Assisted by gravity slingshots, the latter probe would reach Uranus in 1986 and Neptune in 1989. Both Voyagers would cross the Heliopause decades later, one in 2012, and the other in 2018. Against all odds, they are both beeping back to Earth as you read these lines.