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

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L33T GUY

by Graham Lee, 

The opening frames of The Art of the Algorithms sets the scene perfectly: a chip tune plays as greeting text scrolls in a waving motion across the screen, reminiscent of a 1980s cracktro. Then, we get a proper title sequence, as electronic music supports a fast-moving tour through the graphics from classic demos.

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.

futureform

by Adrian Kosmaczewski, 

To say that we live in a pivotal moment in tech history is such commonplace that you would think it would be unworthy to use such an epithet in this journal. Yet we do think that, but we are very aware that it will be only a decade or so before we can perform a conscious analysis of the various messes of our era (if this magazine is still around, that is). In the meantime, we have hunch feelings and commentators.

Eileen Uchitelle

by Adrian Kosmaczewski, 

It is seemingly impossible to talk about Ruby without talking about Rails, and this article will not be the exception. This web framework has had a both terrific and terrible (some would say oversized) influence in the past 20 years, and has, against all odds, regained interest in a world of microservices, DevOps engineers, containers, and Kubernetes clusters. Rails has been able to adapt to the unknown, from the burgeoning cloud services of 2005 to the latest fads, but always gathering a chorus of frowning eyes around the "magic" it uses and enables.

Solomon Hykes

by Adrian Kosmaczewski, 

Around 2004 I was working as a .NET software developer, building custom applications for a rather large Swiss customer who shall remain nameless. As part of the engagement, we had to not only write said software application following their requirements, but also deliver it in person. Yes, in person. We had to take a snapshot of the source code of the application (stored in a Visual SourceSafe repository, please do not laugh too loud), save it in a USB thumb drive, and drive to the location, where we would explain the deployment team how to build and deploy it.

Phil Nash

by Adrian Kosmaczewski, 

A quick search on YouTube with the query "Considered Harmful" is a revealing exercise. The number and variety of articles thereby returned is outstanding and, to a certain extent, hilarious. The day I wrote this article I had the following ones popping up, all of which were literally considered harmful for the purposes of the content: threads, enums, C++ generics, rand(), if, else, the UPDATE SQL statement, global variables, user stories, architecture, YAML (well, this one we can agree upon), IInterface, mocking frameworks, assemblers, abstractions, penetration testing, and yes, even programming itself. Among those search results there was even a talk by Alan Kay himself named "Normal Considered Harmful".

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!

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