deprogrammaticaipsum

deprogrammaticaipsum, 6 hours ago to random

"Each one of us is responsible for the creation of the world that we will leave to the younger generations. But software engineers have an even greater responsibility: as we write the lines of code that drive our transport systems, our health care, our business transactions, our privacy (or lack thereof), our flows of information, and our livelihoods, we have a greater moral duty towards society."

https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/by-all-means/

deprogrammaticaipsum, 7 hours ago to random

"In the twenty-five years since the appearance of the phrase “Open Source”, many authors have tried to explain this simple fact: why do software developers willingly and spontaneously collaborate, often on a pro bono basis, to the creation of open-source software? And most importantly, how does this even happen? Many books have been written around this seemingly illogical fact."

https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/nadia-asparouhova/

deprogrammaticaipsum, 7 hours ago to random

"The post-Roman period came to be known as the Dark Ages first because they were seen to be unenlightened, until Caesar Baronius retconned it: they were dark because of the lack of written records. In the Digital Dark Ages everybody is writing: posting to Reddit; sending e-mails; chatting in Telegram; producing Office 365 documents. But nobody will be able to read anything they write, and so knowledge of this time will be forgotten. Software has truly eaten the world."

https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/the-digital-dark-ages/

deprogrammaticaipsum, 7 hours ago to random

"As I write these words, the United States is firmly engaged in a society-wide degenerative process similar to what Germany and other European powers committed themselves to during the 1930s. John von Neumann and Kurt Gödel were born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, while Albert Einstein was in Germany. The three ended up working in the same institute on the other side of the Atlantic."

https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/william-aspray/

deprogrammaticaipsum, 7 hours ago to random

"The third book, by Louis V. Gerstner, Jr., is precisely the story of how IBM avoided a cataclysm between 1993 and 1998. Gerstner was IBM’s CEO from 1993 to 2002. (…) In our industry, we hear plenty of entrepreneurs referring to the “second coming” of Steve Jobs to save Apple from bankruptcy in 1997, but very few remember that Gerstner pulled a similar feat with IBM just a decade prior, with a much larger payroll than Apple’s, and arguably, with much more at stake."

https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/james-cortada-emerson-pugh-louis-gerstner-jr/

deprogrammaticaipsum, 2 days ago to random

“In this magazine, we have long advocated (and will continue to do so) for ideas usually associated with “eastern philosophy;” such as patience, collectivism, meaning, empathy, ethics, and unity. Not in the vague or vacuous sense of “changing the world” or “put a dent in the universe” but in the basic idea of building a new world through ethical, conscious, and quality software.”

https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/geoffrey-james/

deprogrammaticaipsum, 3 days ago to random

"Come to mind the names of violent battles: DR-DOS, Taligent, AmigaOS, Newton OS, Windows for Pen Computing, Copland, Vino, NeXTSTEP, Novell NetWare, JavaOS, BeOS, DoJ vs Microsoft, Rhapsody, POSIX, Linux is communism, Linux is a cancer, Samizdat, Windows Vista, SCO, Symbian, Solaris, OpenSolaris, systemd, Windows Phone, MeeGo, Tizen, Firefox OS, Sailfish OS. Countless mythical man-month hours were lost. Millions of lines of code were fired."

https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/aftermath-of-the-kernel-wars/

deprogrammaticaipsum, 4 days ago to random

To commemorate the "Design" issue of this month, nothing better than… a new face. Check it out now :)

https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/

deprogrammaticaipsum, 7 days ago to random

The 68th edition of De Programmatica Ipsum is out!

This month we analyze the impossible dialogue between graphic designers and developers.; in the Library section, we review "Design for Hackers" by David Kadavy, and in our Vidéothèque section, we watch "Helvetica" by Gary Hustwit.

https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/issue-68-design/

deprogrammaticaipsum, 10 days ago to random

"Coding for fun, or coding for money, are two absolutely, completely, and irrevocably orthogonal activities. This offset applies not only to coding, by the way; performing any human activity for the mere objective of getting paid, substantially modifies the dynamics of the activity in question, and more importantly, of the person doing it, in ways that neither psychology nor economics fully understand."

https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/specialization-is-for-insects/

deprogrammaticaipsum, 10 days ago to random

"A lot has been written about the Apollo Computer and the true nature of alarms 1201 and 1202. We feel the urge to highlight Margaret Hamilton‘s monumental contributions to the history of the 20th century: not just the code that, at the heist of the first manned Lunar landing, produced one of the most dramatic error codes ever logged in the history of software engineering, but her idea of transforming mere programming into, precisely, software engineering."

https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/margaret-hamilton/

deprogrammaticaipsum, 11 days ago to random

"The name of Kurt Gödel often appears in the pages of this magazine, and with reason. After all, the thought process that led to modern computing has Gödel as a major milestone and can be clumsily summarized as follows: Cantor ⇒ Hilbert ⇒ Russell ⇒ Gödel ⇒ Church ⇒ Turing ⇒ Von Neumann."

https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/guillermo-martinez-gustavo-pineiro/

deprogrammaticaipsum, 11 days ago to random

"By 1973, the first volume of the defining work of our craft, “The Art of Computer Programming” had been available in bookstores since 1968, and its first chapter literally consisted of a 100-something page long introduction to various mathematical concepts. Induction, logarithms, series, matrices, elementary number theory, permutations and factorials, Fibonacci numbers, are some of the subjects exposed in those beautifully typeset pages."

https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/in-praise-of-mathematics/

deprogrammaticaipsum, 12 days ago to random

"Legend has it that the first program written in the BASIC programming language was executed in the early hours of May 1st, 1964 in the DTSS of Dartmouth College. The minds behind this language are Mr. Kurtz, and John G. Kemeny. The latter is a member of The Martians, the famous group of Hungarian scientists that migrated to the USA before World War II, including luminaires such as John von Neumann, Theodore von Kármán, and Paul Erdős."

Happy 60th birthday, BASIC!

https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/programming-the-liberal-arts/

deprogrammaticaipsum, 15 days ago to random

"Inspired by this philosophy, a developer only known by the nickname of “_why the lucky stiff” or simply “_why,” wrote The Poignant Guide to Ruby, which might as well qualify of the weirdest, funniest, most radically different, programming book of all time. In a sequence of vignettes, mixing tweaked pictures, drawings, and code snippets, _why introduces Ruby, its syntax, and its philosophy."

https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/a-brief-history-of-programming-artists/

deprogrammaticaipsum, 15 days ago to random

"The next 25 years in BASIC's life will probably be even more exciting than the first 25."

Bill Gates, on "The 25th Birthday of BASIC", BYTE Magazine, October 1989.

(Record scratch sound; narrator voice: spoiler alert, it was not.)

https://d3399nw8s4ngfo.cloudfront.net/visual-basic/Byte_Magazine_Vol_14-10.pdf

deprogrammaticaipsum, 25 days ago to random

"The hatred against Microsoft, starting with the letter to hobbyists in 1976, fueled by Dijkstra, Wulf, Papert, and so many others, naturally spread to BASIC. If you read carefully, the “13 ways to loathe VB” penned by Verity Stob are directed more to Microsoft than to the language itself:

> 13. Bill is making even more money out of this. And I am powerless to stop him. In fact, I am helping him.

Of course, abominations such as On Error Resume Next did not help."

https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/programming-the-liberal-arts/

deprogrammaticaipsum, 25 days ago to random

"BASIC deserved better than to be dismissed and vilified by generations of so-called “professional” or “academic” programmers. Mark Jones Lorenzo’s “Endless Loop,” together with the myriad of available implementations of the language, and the collective impetus of retrocomputing fans to keep it alive in our memories, are the closest thing to a monument that it will ever get."

https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/mark-jones-lorenzo/

deprogrammaticaipsum, 27 days ago to random

"The Z3 was the first Turing-complete machine, and Zuse went on to write the first computer chess program in the first high-level programming language Plankalkül, a language of his own devising and an unacknowledged forerunner to ALGOL. This was all part of his PhD thesis, but having failed to pay the submission fee to the University of Augsburg he did not obtain a degree."

https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/on-research-software-engineering/

deprogrammaticaipsum, 27 days ago to random

"What has happened is not that we have become disengaged with computers. What has happened is that most of us with a computer do not care about it as a computer. Owning a Commodore 64 is no longer a badge of membership in the hobbyist computer club. That does not mean that the hobbyists are not out there, just that you have got to look harder to find them."

https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/zx2020/

deprogrammaticaipsum, 1 month ago to random

The 67th edition of De Programmatica Ipsum is out!

This month we argue that "editor wars" are a pointless loss of time; in the Library section, we review "Code" by Charles Petzold; and in our Vidéothèque section, we watch a video from the Fireship channel.

https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/issue-67-text-editors/

deprogrammaticaipsum, 1 month ago to random

"The dominance of IBM in the computer industry not only meant large installed bases of IBM 1401s, but also that those operating them would wear the same uniform as those selling them.

Things changed slowly, and then all of a sudden. This transition is quite visible in the “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” series of commercials made by Apple in the mid-2000s, one of which even featured fashion icon Gisele Bündchen herself."

https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/tenue-correcte-exigee/

deprogrammaticaipsum, 1 month ago to random

"If you are in the market for business guidance, and enjoy good stories, you will love this one. In our industry, we hear plenty of entrepreneurs referring to the “second coming” of Steve Jobs to save Apple from bankruptcy in 1997, but very few remember that Gerstner pulled a similar feat with IBM just a decade prior, with a much larger payroll than Apple’s, and arguably, with much more at stake."

https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/james-cortada-emerson-pugh-louis-gerstner-jr/

deprogrammaticaipsum, 1 month ago to random

"Software engineers are not always aware that our cherished Silicon Valley was a side effect (with apologies to our readers fond of functional programming) of the San Francisco counterculture of the late 60s. Such a movement and its devotion to LSD gave us Scott McKenzie singing at the Monterey Festival (where a certain Ravi Shankar made its debut in front of an American audience), and it also sparked influential software companies with names like Lotus, Sun, and Apple."
https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/geoffrey-james/