A magazine about programmers, code, and society. Written by and for humans since 2018.
By Graham Lee, August 1st, 2022
Adrian previously discussed Working Effectively with Legacy Code when he talked about how to choose a programming language for your book. It deserves revisiting though, so here it is in the library section.
By Adrian Kosmaczewski, July 4th, 2022
There was a moment in which Kurt Gödel, Albert Einstein, and John von Neumann were all roaming the halls of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton at the same time. Let that information sink in. Humanity experiences such gatherings of brilliant minds in a remote location of the space-time continuum only every so often; maybe the ancient Greeks and the men of the Renaissance witnessed such periods in time, as did the IAS staff at the end of World War II. How much will we have to wait for the next such event?
By Graham Lee, June 6th, 2022
They say that software is eating the world. They also say, or rather they say that Jean-Jacques Rousseau said: "Quand le peuple n'aura plus rien à manger, il mangera le riche."
By Adrian Kosmaczewski, May 2nd, 2022
iOS developers new to the platform are completely (and thankfully) unaware of its rocky start during its initial years. The first iPhone was announced on January 9th, 2007, and was released in the United States on June 29th that year. The iPhone SDK was announced by Steve Jobs in October 2007, and released in March 2008. But even before the official SDK was first announced, people were already "jailbreaking" the device, and thereby making applications for the iPhone. First-generation iPhone and iPad developers will surely chuckle when reading the words "PwnageTool," "JailbreakMe," and the name of the first App Store, also known as "Cydia."
By Graham Lee, April 4th, 2022
We are told that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. This is certainly true of the history of computing, at least as far as its telling is concerned.
By Adrian Kosmaczewski, March 7th, 2022
In the 2008 book "Dreams That Glitter", telling the story of the English pop group Girls Aloud, one of its members, the late Sarah Harding, said: "I've got a t-shirt that says 'Well-behaved women don't make history'. Funny how the stylist gave that to me…"
By Graham Lee, February 7th, 2022
It would be inappropriate to have an issue on software licensing without including one of the people whose work has done most to shape the topic. Somehow we managed not to mention him by name in the issue on Free, Libre, and Open Source Software. Well, today we correct that.
By Adrian Kosmaczewski, January 3rd, 2022
If there is one thing that computer books are most definitely not usually praised for, it is their visuals. Thankfully, books about user experience and user interface design are usually, indeed, worthy of such acclaim. In this case, however, limiting a review to such criteria would be short-sighted, poor, and unjust. The truth is that most important literature works are multi-layered, profound, and suitable for multiple relectures.
By Graham Lee, December 6th, 2021
This month, the methodology issue, is a good opportunity to take a look across a whole swathe of my bookshelf and deal with it all at once. The important point to bear in mind is that methodology is about the approach you take to building software. That means how you decide what to build, plan it out, design it, implement it, test it, deploy it, document it, and manage (and even pay for) all of that. The 1990s was the decade when object-oriented techniques hit the mainstream: it was also the time of the methodology wars.
By Adrian Kosmaczewski, November 1st, 2021
Robert L. Glass wrote a book in 1998 called "Software 2020", currently rated with only one star… by the author himself. In his review (written in 2017) he justifies this abysmal record because of a simple observation: none of the predictions in the book turned out to become a reality.