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by Adrian Kosmaczewski,
In an era where your favorite JavaScript runtime is rewritten in Rust by an LLM bored at lunchtime, and we need gigabytes of RAM to render a chat application, it is remarkably humbling to look back at the primordial soup of programming. You might scoff, roll your eyes, and adjust your Neovim configuration to stubbornly ignore .f90 files. But while we debate the aesthetic merits of closures, pure functions, and pipe operators, Fortran is still quietly out there, calculating orbital mechanics, running global weather simulations, and generally doing the grown-up work of the world.
by Adrian Kosmaczewski,
Archival footage from the early 1980s has this distinct, almost palpable texture to it. For members of Generation X, it brings memories of Donkey Kong, He-Man, and Star Wars. The colors are slightly washed out, the audio hums with the analog hiss of magnetic tape, and the people on screen seem entirely unaware that they are standing at the edge of technological history. This is particularly true of this month's Vidéothèque entry: there is an added, inescapable layer to the viewing experience: the absolute, crushing weight of dramatic irony. Brace for impact.
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.
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.
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".
