deprogrammaticaipsum

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/

deprogrammaticaipsum, 2 months ago to random

"It was Kathy Sierra who triggered a major, deeper change in the way programming was taught. To be honest, the books by themselves would already have been a major triumph. Her work happened at a time when the dot-com boom opened the door for new ideas, right in the middle of the Web 2.0 craze, and right before the rise of the smartphone and social media."

#InternationalWomensDay

https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/kathy-sierra/

deprogrammaticaipsum, 2 months ago to random

"Fournier has been there. She has worked at small companies and large, in IC, middle, and senior management roles. She is not here to refine the algorithm given above, but instead to help us get comfortable with the idea that there is no algorithm, just heuristics. She describes the heuristics that have worked for her, as well as the times when they have not worked.

This book is useful even if you do not plan to be a manager."

#InternationalWomensDay

https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/camille-fournier/

deprogrammaticaipsum, 2 months ago to random

"In spite of the large Union Jack in her chest, Peggy Carter becomes “Captain Carter”, and not “Captain Britain.”

Her name choice is perfectly understandable; at least in our universe, I do not think the country described by Mar Hicks neither deserved a Peggy Carter nor the women who built the computer industry in this, our universe, before their field, recognition, and profits were usurped by men."

#InternationalWomensDay

https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/mar-hicks/

deprogrammaticaipsum, 2 months ago to random

"Erica Sadun was already well known in the jailbreak online community, patiently and painstakingly dissecting every new release of the iPhone OS, and dumping class headers for all developers to use in their own applications. She was referred to by Engadget as “one of the soldiers heading up the fight to break Apple’s stranglehold.”"

#InternationalWomensDay

https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/erica-sadun/

deprogrammaticaipsum, 2 months ago to random

"One of the things that makes Liskov such an influential author is that she believes that academic software engineering needs to be applicable to practice to be of any value."

#InternationalWomensDay

https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/barbara-liskov/

deprogrammaticaipsum, 2 months ago to random

"We feel the urge to highlight Margaret Hamilton's monumental contributions to the history of the 20th century: not just the assembly language code that, at the heist of the first manned Lunar landing, produced some of the most dramatic error codes ever logged in the history of software engineering, but her groundbreaking idea of transforming mere programming into, precisely, software engineering."

#InternationalWomensDay

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

deprogrammaticaipsum, 2 months ago to random

To celebrate #InternationalWomensDay we invite you to read our selection of articles highlighting some women who became legends in computer history: Margaret Hamilton, Adele Goldberg, Camille Fournier, Kathy Sierra, Barbara Liskov, and Jean Sammet, and many others!

https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/category/women/

deprogrammaticaipsum, 2 months 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, 2 months ago to random

"The IBM 1401 was widely praised in its time, externally for its reliability and durability, and internally for being a goddamn cash cow. What did people do with them? IBM 1401s were routinely used for sales analysis, inventory, and payroll; they spent most of their time just tabulating basic info in and out. It is one of the few computers in history that cannot run Doom."

https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/ken-ross-paul-laughton/

deprogrammaticaipsum, 2 months ago to random

"Sadly, my birth also meant the end of my mother’s career at IBM. You see, to say that child-bearing IBMers were not appreciated by their male bosses is the understatement of the century. This was 1970s IBM Argentina, after all: computer hardware, suit and ties, and lots of cash. The testosterone could be smelled all the way from Diagonal Norte to the River Plate stadium."

https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/think/

deprogrammaticaipsum, 2 months ago to random

"But RDBMS require more than just a query language; C. J. Date introduced the concept of referential integrity in 1981, and Jim Gray the idea of transactions and ACID in 1983–no, not the acid that Steve Jobs was recommending to Bill Gates to drop, but the one you read about in database books, about atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability."

https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/the-elephant-in-the-room/

deprogrammaticaipsum, 2 months ago to random

And we continue with the celebrations! On the birdsite, our account never reached more than 280 followers after 4 years of activity… but in the Fediverse, we have reached 300 in less than a year and a half! 🎉

Many thanks for your support! 💙

deprogrammaticaipsum, 2 months ago to random

Thanks everyone! 🎉 💙

deprogrammaticaipsum, 2 months ago to random

The 66th edition of De Programmatica Ipsum is out!

In this edition, we analyze the rise in popularity of Git and how it eclipsed everything else; in the Library section, we review "Pragmatic Version Control Using Git" by Travis Swicegood; and in our Vidéothèque section, we watch Linus Torvalds explaining Git in a 2007 Google TechTalk.

https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/issue-66-version-control/

deprogrammaticaipsum, 3 months ago to random

The 65th edition of De Programmatica Ipsum is out!

In this edition, we react to the sudden news of Niklaus Wirth's passing with memories of the past and perspectives of the present; in the Library section, we review "Classics in Software Engineering" by Edward Nash Yourdon; and in our Vidéothèque section, we watch some recent interviews of Niklaus Wirth himself.

https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/issue-65-pascal/

deprogrammaticaipsum, 3 months ago to random

"In short, the experience of programming, the one you, dear reader, live day in and day out in your daily job, has not fundamentally evolved in the past 60 or even 70 years. Our command line environments even have the TTY (short for “teletype”) moniker embedded in them. We are still coding… procedures… in text files… using sequential models."

https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/bret-victor/

deprogrammaticaipsum, 3 months ago to random

"Beyond his contributions to logic and mathematics, Russell was a passionate fighter for peace and nuclear disarmament, most notably using his celebrity to contact directly Nikita Khrushchev and John F. Kennedy in the most complicated moments of the Cold War, or joining forces with Albert Einstein, Jean-Paul Sartre, or Simone de Beauvoir in successive calls for peace. His writing begat the bestseller philosophy book of the 20th century, and brought him a Nobel Prize."

https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/bertrand-russell/

deprogrammaticaipsum, 3 months ago to random

"The best qualifier that this author could find to define PostgreSQL and its historical impact is the word “triumph.” PostgreSQL has stood both the test of time and the Wisconsin Benchmarks, becoming the reference yardstick for a whole category of products. Its reliability, dependability, speed, and efficiency, are all out of the charts and add up to what is undoubtedly one of the most refined software packages available in the open-source world today."

https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/the-elephant-in-the-room/

deprogrammaticaipsum, 3 months ago to random

"The least “Paperwork Explosion” does is to show the IBM MT/ST itself; what we see is a sequence of explosions, followed by IBMers talking about the need for speed in our world.

Frantic. Explosions. Frenzied. Explosions. Do more with less. Explosions. Capitalism. Corporate. Explosions. Think. Speed.

The movie shows hints of Henson’s humor, the most visible of which is this unnamed farmer, who appears in a decidedly bucolic, soothing, and non-technological environment."

https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/jim-henson/

deprogrammaticaipsum, 3 months ago to random

"It is unfortunate that people dealing with computers often have little interest in the history of their subject. As a result, many concepts and ideas are propagated and advertised as being new, which existed decades ago, perhaps under a different terminology."

Niklaus Wirth, "A Brief History of Software Engineering" (2008)

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4617912/

deprogrammaticaipsum, 4 months ago to random

"In Spanish, the word “button” (“botón”) can be used as both “push button” or “shirt button”. Being the son of a costume tailor, my father first considered the latter meaning, before the former kicked in.

On his smartphone, neither of these were visible. Nor a push button, nor a shirt button, not a light switch, not a calculator button, not a door knob, not a push lever. What was visible was the blue word “Done” eerily floating in the top-right corner of the screen."

https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/the-button-and-the-spoon/

deprogrammaticaipsum, 4 months ago to retrocomputing

The 64th edition of De Programmatica Ipsum is out!

This month we look at the reasons behind the resurgence in popularity of #retrocomputing; in the Library section, we review “Home Computers” by Alex Wiltshire and John Short; and in our Vidéothèque section, we watch some episodes of the TV show "Computer Chronicles".

https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/issue-64-retrocomputing/

deprogrammaticaipsum, 4 months ago to random

"The most important factor blocking the development of telecommuting in Switzerland for the past 20 years were, without any hint of a doubt, hierarchy and micromanagement. To a large extent, for good or worse, most of my managers have always insisted in knowing all of my tasks in excruciatingly detail, and I know many colleagues would agree with me on this matter."

https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/await-in-async-we-trust/