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By Adrian Kosmaczewski, April 6th, 2020
Welcome to the nineteenth issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, dedicated to the subject of Cross-Platform. In this edition, Graham analyzes the economics of cross-platform systems, and its impact in usability, availability, and ultimately, the profit margins of vendors; Adrian searches old issues of Dr. Dobbs' Journal to contrast the evolution of cross-platform languages, frameworks, and IDEs, in the past 25 years; and in the Library section, Graham explains in detail Adele Goldberg's contributions to Smalltalk-80 and to the computer industry, in particular through the books "Smalltalk-80: the Interactive Programming Environment," "Smalltalk-80: The Language and its Implementation," and "Smalltalk-80: Bits of History, Words of Advice."
By Graham Lee, April 6th, 2020
When we talk about "cross-platform" software, we necessarily invoke the idea that there are software platforms. What are they? Do they really exist?
As I write these lines, I have three Kubernetes clusters running in the background in my computer (don't ask.) I connect to those clusters using K9s, a handy terminal application that provides a nice view of all those deployments and pods running beneath layers of software and other emulation facilities.
These days, it's hard to appreciate that Object-Oriented Programming is so easy, it was taught to kids in junior high before it was ever taught to adults. As supposedly senior software engineers debate whether a Car truly "is a" Vehicle, and whether it wouldn't be easier to learn lambda calculus and determine the median monad blog post than to reflect the real objects in the real-world problem they're solving in their software, it seems reasonable to ask: is it really so difficult?
