A magazine about programmers, code, and society. Written by and for humans since 2018.
By Adrian Kosmaczewski, March 2nd, 2020
From October 24th to 29th, 1927, twenty-nine scientists gathered in Brussels for the fifth Solvay Conference. Among the attendees, of which seventeen got a Nobel Prize before or after attending, were Erwin Schrödinger, Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg, Paul Dirac, Louis de Broglie, Max Born, Niels Bohr, Max Planck, Marie Curie, Hendrik Lorentz, and Albert Einstein. One might think there might have not been such an assembly of brilliant thinkers since the Platonic Academy.
By Graham Lee, February 3rd, 2020
Many developers will have heard of Barbara Liskov, through her appearance in Robert C. Martin's SOLID list of design principles. The abstract of her 1994 paper with Jeanette Wing, A Behavioral Notion of Subtyping, makes the principle sound easy in, well, in principle.
By Adrian Kosmaczewski, January 6th, 2020
When the author of these words started its career as a software developer, "object orientation" was all the rage. "Serious" programming languages were object oriented. "Professional" programming environments allowed one to view "objects" and "classes" in all of their glory. Inheritance, not composition, was the way of the future. Design patterns names were the answer to actual interview questions.
By Graham Lee, December 2nd, 2019
The Kernighan and Ritchie book opens with the "Hello, World" example. The C++ Programming Language follows an annotated table of contents with "The purpose of a programming language is to help express ideas in code." Cox, on the other hand, opens with the story of Eli Whitney and the industrial revolution.
By Adrian Kosmaczewski, May 6th, 2019
Somehow we all agree about the importance of history in our society. We teach it to our younger ones, we quote it in our speeches, we talk about it during our dinners. Maybe it is because we had to memorize the names of battles fought ages ago, and we expect to capitalize on that fact to appear wise (if not arrogant) to others. We might even agree with history itself, shaking our heads in dismay to some extent, as we see the events unfolding nowadays. A phenomenon which, by all measures, tends to increase with age.
By Graham Lee, January 7th, 2019
A quote from the cover of Volume One of Professor Donald Knuth's Magnum Opus, "The Art of Computer Programming (3rd edition)": "If you think you're a really good programmer… read (Knuth's) Art of Computer Programming… You should definitely send me a résumé if you can read the whole thing." "Me" here refers to the author of the quote, Bill Gates.
