OrchardNest

Welcome to the thirty-seventh issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, opening our fourth year of publication, and dedicated to Microsoft. In this edition, Graham explains how programmers have perceived Microsoft and its success through the years;...

When I started in the world of professional computing, it was popular to spell MS as micro$oft or micro$haft or micro$loth. Or, if you were feeling particularly snarky, micros~1. Windows was invariably spelt windoze. What did they do to...

In May 30th, 2007, Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg interviewed Bill Gates and Steve Jobs in a now widely cited D5 conference panel. At the beginning of that session, both were asked about what they thought was the greatest contribution the...

Yes, you read that correctly. Microsoft. Writing on information security. They may be the software company who have done the most writing on information security, including many security software companies.

Welcome to the thirty-sixth issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, closing our third year of publication, and dedicated to the subject of Innovation. In this edition, Adrian discusses Microsoft's de facto monopoly of innovation around...

If there is one galaxy in the software development universe that has suffered from the relentless, unstoppable, frantic, and unbearable pace of innovation, that one is, undoubtedly, JavaScript.

This fascination society has with innovation is a funny thing. There is no need for it, and yet here we are. Always be disrupting. Move fast and break things.

O'Reilly published in 2020 the seventh edition of one of the biggest bestseller programming books of the past 25 years, Flanagan's "JavaScript: The Definitive Guide". At 700 pages and weighing 1.2 kg, it is a book that easily stands out in...

Welcome to the thirty-fifth issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, dedicated to the subject of Python. In this edition, Graham describes the pains caused by the decade-long migration from Python 2 to 3; Adrian describes the preeminence of Python...

For many people, both inside and outside the Python community, even mentioning the Python language brings to mind the Python 2-3 transition. Let us see what happened.

At the risk of alienating most of the readership of this magazine, here is a confession. I hated Python for a very long time. My issue was not with the language per se, even though the indentation rules have put me off for a while. No, the...

Not everything that is worth reading is a book. A good programmer's library (I will let you decide whether that is a good library owned by a programmer, or a library belonging to a good programmer) includes essays, scholarly articles,...

Welcome to the thirty-fourth issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, dedicated to the subject of the Job Market. In this edition, Adrian describes the painful recent evolution of the Swiss tech job market; Graham reflects on the difficulties of...

Until the mid-90s, the Swiss job market required two things of anyone interested in pursuing a career in management in any major local industry: a university degree… and a grade in the Swiss Army. As a consequence, in the Swiss side of my...

It is very easy to get information about career progression in the software engineering world, but very hard to get good information about it. To understand how the various problems collude to stop us learning about our own career paths,...

There was a time when I advertised my services as "Ruby on Rails" programmer. It was by that time that I got to learn the names and work of many people in that field; many of whom had come from the J2EE world, were tired of configuring...

Welcome to the thirty-third issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, dedicated to the subject of Management. In this edition, Graham analyzes the root causes of dysfunctional teams and how to solve them; Adrian argues that the chasm between...

It is going to be hard to write anything about management for this month's issue, because the entire field is moribund. There has been no innovation in management for decades, supposed sea changes in thought have either failed to take hold...

To a large extent, most of the software team managers I met in the course of my career were not able to judge neither the qualities nor the techniques required to create a software artifact. They were incapable of understanding the very...

As soon as Adrian and I agreed that Management would be the topic of this issue, I knew that I would share the benefits of Camille Fournier's book, The Manager's Path. It is the most succinct introduction to software engineering management...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Welcome to the thirty-first issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, dedicated to the subject of the English Language. In this edition, Graham explains the conflicting relationship of programming language designers with English; Adrian dives into...

There is a section in the book AppleScript: the Definitive Guide by Matt Neuburg (Covers Mac OS X Panther!) called "The English-likeness monster". In this section, Neuburg lists various difficulties that arise from AppleScript's...

You surely heard that old story, where one fish asks another "how is the water today?" and the second replies, "what the hell is water?" Similarly, few of us seem to think about English. It is all around us.

It is a fairly well-known, but perhaps not broadly appreciated, fact that Apple's Macintosh could have been a very different computer. Sometimes known as the father of the Mac, sometimes as its eccentric uncle, the project was originally...

Welcome to the thirtieth issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, dedicated to the subject of Home Office. In this edition, Adrian explores the conditio sine qua non required for telecommuting to develop and thrive; Graham analyzes the economics...

In 1997 I moved back to Argentina to start a career in software engineering in a small web startup. They were in such a small office in the outskirts of Buenos Aires, that my boss told me to go to the phone company, and get a new phone...

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...