OrchardNest

Welcome to the twenty-ninth issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, dedicated to the subject of Internet of Things. In this edition, Graham tells his own personal IoT story filled with pain and irony; Adrian argues that the IoT industry is the...

This issue of De Programmatica Ipsum comes out as I have been in my current house for four years. The previous owners had installed a smart thermostat to control the heating and hot water, and had left it and the control hub along with all...

Reading this magazine is a political act. When choosing between Pravda or the Financial Times; Fox News or PBS; Daring Fireball or Paul Thurrott's SuperSite for Windows, a reader should know what those publications stand for. Every...

You may be worried that I am going to talk about an author of books that are not about programming, and you are correct and incorrect. Correct, in that Hofstadter's books are not about programming (the intellectually hollow like to claim...

Welcome to the twenty-eigth issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, dedicated to the subject of Programming as a Hobby. In this edition, Adrian explains how hobbies prevent specialization from taking over our minds; Graham argues that the current...

There is a whole field called "Recreational Mathematics;" a moniker that might as well be replaced with "Mathematics as a Hobby." I personally enjoy dabbling in it a lot; I am mostly interested in number theory feats: Ramanujan's...

There is a common trope that says we would get more children interested in programming as a hobby if programming as a hobby was like the programming our generation did as a hobby. By our generation, I mean a broad swathe of people in WEIRD...

Imagine that you are a fourth grader in California, in 1973. You were 6 or 7 when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon, and there were still astronauts up there just last year. On the radio you can hear Pink Floyd, Elton John...

Welcome to the twenty-seventh issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, dedicated to the subject of Networking. In this edition, Graham explores one of the most mysterious slogans of all time in the computer industry; Adrian recalls his first steps...

Back in the mists of time, an early Sun Microsystems employee by the name of John Gage coined the term "the network is the computer" to describe the centrality Sun put on network capabilities when designing their workstations.

I remember vividly the first time I saw somebody "online." It was early in a morning of December 1994, in the hallways of the "Sciences 2" building of the University of Geneva. One of my classmates, who worked part-time as a professional...

I almost wrote this article not about McConnell, but Microsoft Press. Why? Because developers always have something to learn, books have been a great way to share information for centuries, so reading about computing is central to the...

Welcome to the twenty-sixth issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, focused on the subject of Hardware. In this edition, Adrian argues that hardware has lost the marketing appeal it had decades ago; Graham investigates the reasons behind the...

My first serious attempt at understanding computer hardware happened during college, in 1994. One of the labs consisted in wiring a 4-bit processor to a series of switches and a LED display. The objective was to make a very simple...

Last month's news that IBM would do a Hewlett-Packard and divide into two—an IT consultancy and a buzzword compliance unit—marks the end of "business as usual" for yet another of the great workstation companies.

Some successful computer books have earned memorable nicknames. There is the "K&R" book, the “Gang of Four” book, and, to please generations of board and role game players, there are also the "Wizard Book", the "Dragon Book", and the...

Welcome to the twenty-fifth issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, starting our third year with a rediscovery of Smalltalk. In this edition, Graham explains that Smalltalk was not a pink plane improvement; Adrian dipped his toes in Smalltalk and...

As computing projects go, particularly foundational computing projects, the history of Smalltalk is well-documented, so a potted version will suffice here. Xerox hired someone in Palo Alto to hire a lot of other people, and invent things...

I must start this article of mine about Smalltalk with a disclaimer: it took me weeks to work out what to talk about for the Smalltalk issue of De Programmatica Ipsum. I just do not know anything about it. I had to learn an unknown...

Kent Beck might deny that Kent Beck needs an entry in the programmers' library. "All I did was rediscover what other people had done before," he might say, or "all I did was to interpret what Ward Cunningham was doing." But that discovery,...

Welcome to the twenty-fourth issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, closing our second year with a celebration of the 25 years of Java. In this edition, Adrian tells the story of the success, the backslash, and the renaissance of Java (the...

Back in the days when I had a day job in the .NET galaxy, I had a colleague who was a terrific C# developer… born in the island of Java. Given the looks I got from him, I think I was the first to point this fact to him. Or maybe I just...

Let me start with an admission: it took me weeks to work out what to talk about for the Java issue of De Programmatica Ipsum. There is just so much to it.

Here are some hard questions. If you were to write a book about any subject related to computers, which programming language would you choose? If you had to teach programming to an absolute beginner, which one would you choose? If you had...

Welcome to the twenty-third issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, dedicated to the subject of Academia. In this edition, Graham explains the current state of software engineering in research, and how it could be improved; Adrian tells his own...

Let's be plain upfront: academia dropped the ball on software engineering. Go back to the genesis of the field, and you see that computing was being advanced mostly by needs in the public sector, with the private sector playing a role. The...

Regular readers of this column already know much of my personal story, including the fact that I am a self-taught software developer. They know that I started programming my Casio fx-180p programmable calculator in the 1980s. They also...

Let's start at the end. The last sentence in "NeXTSTEP Programming Step One: Object-Oriented Applications" by Simson L. Garfinkel and Michael K. Mahoney looks like this: "Go out and write a killer app!" This is slightly punchier than the...

Welcome to the twenty-second issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, dedicated to the subject of The Cloud. In this edition, Adrian argues that the PC was an accident in history, stuck between two chapters of the same story; Graham explains how...

In November 12, 1990, a 35 year-old Bill Gates introduced his “Information at your Fingertips” concept during his keynote at COMDEX. The PC, he said, would become “more personal,” integrating “fax, voice and electronic mail,” and providing...

There is no direct evidence that Thomas Watson, Sr. predicted in 1943 that there would be “a world market for five computers”. First, he probably didn’t know about computers back then: in the 1940s computers were...

Of all the articles I have written in this “Library” section, this has been by far the most difficult to write of them all. It is extremely hard to summarize in a thousand words the major achievements of a person that has...