A magazine about programmers, code, and society. Written by and for humans since 2018.

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Philippe Kahn

by Adrian Kosmaczewski,

How did companies sell Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) to the masses back in the early 1990s, during the "Peak Of Inflated Expectations" of the OOP hype cycle? We have already seen such an example in the Vidéothèque section of this magazine, in which Steve Jobs would demonstrate how to build an application using objects on a NeXT computer. In this month’s entry, we will learn about OOP concepts from one of Borland’s founders and chairmen, Philippe Kahn himself.

Ryan Baker

by Adrian Kosmaczewski,

The filmography of Christopher Nolan runs along a common thread: a never-ending obsession with human memory. In "Memento" (2000), Leonard Shelby must solve the horrendous rape and murder of his wife while dealing with short-term memory loss. In "The Prestige" (2006), memory is self-deception. Dom Cobb, in "Inception" (2010), keeps building an emotional and subjective reality around the souvenir of his wife. Cooper’s memory in "Interstellar" (2014) is non-linear, and oblivious to time dilation issues. "Tenet" (2020) opposes the existence of our memory to our capacity for free will. Finally, "Oppenheimer" (2023) gives a moral perspective through the regretful memory of building the ultimate weapon. Nolan screams at us that human memory is non-linear, repetitive, unreliable, and most importantly, in a perpetual conflict with that thing we call reality.

Felienne Hermans

by Adrian Kosmaczewski,

Today we are going to talk about a person in a quest to let everyone know that the most popular functional programming language in the world is none other than Microsoft Excel. Yes, the claim sounds outlandish, debatable, laughable, even ridiculous, but she has both data and anecdotal experience backing her point, and this month’s Vidéothèque movie is a brilliant presentation of it. Also, let us be honest; as software developers it is our duty to use our beloved brains, and go past the mocking stages in order to learn and embrace the unknown; in this case, the language used by most of the modern business world to communicate: spreadsheets.

Kévin Dunglas

by Adrian Kosmaczewski,

PHP is the effective lingua franca of cheap web hosting. You know, that thing costing 5 bucks a month, where your uncle hosts a WordPress blog about fishing and his personal email. You know, that crappy service that comes with some gigabytes on a shared server, a nice LAMP stack on top, a shitty cPanel and WHM combo to manage things... and SFTP access to upload pictures from Jamie and Larry's wedding in Chattanooga. Woop woop!

Doug Engelbart

by Adrian Kosmaczewski,

As in any human group, there are certain pilgrimages, certain rites of passage that all software developers apparently must go through. They are various and equally anecdotical: to compile and boot their own Linux kernel; to read "The Art of Computer Programming" in its entirety (and then send their CV to Bill Gates); to give a presentation in a conference; and finally, to sit through the whole duration of "The Mother of All Demos", the recording of the unavoidable presentation made by Douglas Engelbart, Bill English, and their team. And this month's Vidéothèque entry is, precisely, said recording.

Grace Hopper & David Letterman

by Adrian Kosmaczewski,

Among the many documents available at the Computer History Museum website there is an interesting artifact: a commercial brochure published in 1957 by the Remington Rand UNIVAC, "a division of Sperry Rand Corporation", titled "introducing a new language for automatic programming". In it, we learn about the advantages of the new (at the time) FLOW-MATIC programming language, the brainchild of United States Navy Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper.

Dave Plummer

by Adrian Kosmaczewski,

Hard to believe as it is, it has been already almost 20 years since the days when Apple plastered the halls of its Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) with huge posters proclaiming "Redmond, start your photocopiers" or "Mac OS X Leopard: Hasta la vista, Vista". The decade of the 2000s, coinciding with Steve Ballmer’s tenure as CEO, is widely perceived as a lost one for Microsoft, and one of the most visible signs of that decline was, without a doubt, the "Longhorn" saga.

Derek Muller & Linus Sebastian

by Adrian Kosmaczewski,

Previous articles in this magazine have explored real-life examples highlighting the insecurity of our modern communications infrastructure. Regular readers might remember the anecdote of an impromptu hacking lesson in the Universidad de Buenos Aires in the year 2000, where our teacher literally intercepted a phone call made by one of the students. The same article goes on to describe how I was able to use a software tool called "CaptureNet" to sniff packets on port 1863 (used by MSN Messenger back in the day) and thus secretly read all the exchanges between my work colleagues in 2001.

Retro Gaming Museum

by Adrian Kosmaczewski,

Reviewing old computers magazines of yore is a pastime most often associated to retrocomputing enthusiasts. It is part of that feeling of bliss that comes with the realization that there used to be a different world, when software was simpler, when corporations did not have that much power, and when programming languages were more approachable; in short, a more innocent time.

Herb Sutter

by Adrian Kosmaczewski,

C++ is under attack. Some argue that it is the language's fault, with those pointers and rules and complexity and undefined behavior, and try once and again to develop a "C++ killer" language, with various degrees of success. Others (rightfully so) defend the language (and its community) by acknowledging its history, its flaws, and proposing ways forward. The former group makes headlines in Reddit and Medium. Instead, the Vidéothèque entry of this month tells the story of a prominent member of the latter group, a certain Herb Sutter.

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