Download these articles as PDF or EPUB.

Guy Steele & Gerry Sussman

by Graham Lee, 

Imagine a world in which two people take the best ideas from programming languages, and create an interpreter for their own programming language. Then they demonstrate that most of the features in that programming language---indeed, in all programming languages---can be constructed out of just three features of their interpreter: lambda application, conditional execution, and variable assignment. Then, they show that variable assignment is the wrong way to think about variable assignment, and show that their interpreter points to the most efficient way to make language compilers, and made a compiler for their interpreted language to show how good that could be. Then, imagine that they share this knowledge with the world, for free, through a series of memos.

Philip Wadler

by Adrian Kosmaczewski, 

On page 138 of the second edition of his 1971 book, "Categories for the Working Mathematician", American mathematician Saunders Mac Lane inadvertently coined one of the most famous memes ever made around programming. It is there, precisely there, and not anywhere else, where the phrase "a monad in X is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors" was published for the first time. As is often the case, the true origin of the meme got lost in collective memory, and it ended up being falsely attributed to Philip Wadler, although, in hindsight, and all things considered, it was an understandable oversight.

Loren Carpenter

by Adrian Kosmaczewski, 

The year is 2026, and we take computer-generated movies for granted: Pixar, Illumination, DreamWorks, and a myriad of smaller studios delight us every year with more and more technical and storytelling prowess. Heck, we even have "artificial intelligence" systems that can generate whole movies out of a single "prompt" consisting of a certain amount of words that make a certain sense in a particular context. 50 years ago, however, the prospect of a computer generating images was the subject of intense scientific research.

Joanna Rutkowska

by Adrian Kosmaczewski, 

In a key scene of the 2012 blockbuster James Bond film "Skyfall", MI6 quartermaster Q, played by Ben Whishaw, realizes too late that plugging a cable into the laptop of a notoriously skilled terrorist like Raoul Silva (one of Javier Bardem's most remarkable roles) was a terrible idea. After a few seconds of connection, the laptop infects the systems of MI6, releasing all physical doors and disabling all security guards, prompting Silva to escape and wreak havoc through the London Underground. A message appears on the laptop screen, taunting Q, reading "Not such a clever boy".

Ulrich Drepper

by Adrian Kosmaczewski, 

This month's Vidéothèque movie provides a (very) short and simple introduction to the subject of memory architecture. But this is not, by far, the minimum any software developer should know about memory segmentation and management for their daily work; let alone computer scientists, or developers working in native code for embedded platforms, or even mobile applications. This is where this month's Library choice shines in full: we are talking of the most comprehensive article you will ever read about the subject of computer memory, by far, and it remains as relevant as it was at the time of its publication 18 years ago.

J. C. R. Licklider & M. Mitchell Waldrop

by Adrian Kosmaczewski, 

The writings of Jorge Luis Borges twist our perception of time and space. In between articles about Shaw, Chesterton, Wilde, and Coleridge, his 1952 book "Otras Inquisiciones" included an unexpected gem: a short story called "El Tiempo y J. W. Dunne". The question is, who was this John William Dunne and what does he have to do with time? Well, his name might be forgotten by contemporary audiences, but Dunne was the author of one of the biggest bestsellers of the first half of the twentieth century.

A Review Of Research Around Programming Education From The 1960s To Today

by Adrian Kosmaczewski, 

The problem of teaching programming skills to new generations of software engineers is as old as the computers themselves. Each generation has tried to do it in a slightly different way, with various degrees of success. There is a lot of literature available online about the subject, and in this article we will point out papers and books that we found to be the most noteworthy. By no means this is an exhaustive list, but it features some interesting entries that might serve as a starting point for your own research.

Sir Tony Hoare

by Adrian Kosmaczewski, 

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.

Edward Nash Yourdon

by Adrian Kosmaczewski, 

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.

Barry Boehm

by Adrian Kosmaczewski, 

We have often talked about software economics in this magazine. For example, when we enumerated Eric Sink's perspectives on the software business, discussed platforms as a paradigm for economic analysis, or talked about how Brad Cox advocated for an object-oriented economy. But there is a more extraordinary author about the subject, one we mentioned a few times in this magazine and who sadly passed away last August: Barry Boehm.

Barbara Liskov

by Graham Lee, 

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.

Back to top