Issue 032: Modernism

May 3rd, 2021

Welcome to the thirty-second issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, dedicated to the subject of Modernism. In this edition Adrian bets on Rust to become the modern programming language of the 2020s, Graham argues that convergence is a fad in the long term, and in the Library section, Adrian highlights the work of Eric Sink and his book "The Business of Software".

The Great Rewriting In Rust

by Adrian Kosmaczewski

The book "Writing Secure Code, 2nd Edition" written by David LeBlanc and Michael Howard, published by Microsoft Press in 2002, was once required reading at Microsoft, following Bill Gates' "Trustworthy Computing" memo. The fifth chapter of said book is titled "Public Enemy #1: The Buffer Overrun" and it starts with a very interesting historical perspective on the problem, referring to the Morris Worm in 1986 as precedent, and even finding occurrences as far back as the 1960s.

Plus Ça Change…

by Graham Lee

Writing a draft for this post was as easy on an HP OmniGo 100 from 1995 as on any modern computer. Arguably easier, because I was not distracted by social media, notifications, or the possibility of a quick dip into another task. There is just me, an LCD screen, two AA batteries, and a really bad keyboard.

Eric Sink

by Adrian Kosmaczewski

Once upon a time, there was no GitHub, no iPhone, no AWS, no Android, no Google App Engine, no Stack Overflow, no Docker, no Kubernetes, no Rust, no Go, no Swift, no Kotlin, no Git, actually Subversion was barely starting to appear in the radar. Most importantly, there were no App Store yet.