0. Preamble
Let us go then, you and I,
When the code is spread against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Code Read #11 from Scott Rosenberg deals with James Noble’s and Robert Biddle’s “Notes on Postmodern Programming”.
1. A Sentimentalist’s Apology
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats,
Of all-night coding, of cheap cube walls,
Of [...]
Posts under ‘CS Literature’
Notes On Notes On Postmodern Programming
Code Read 10 – Guy Steele on “Growing a Language”
When doing software design, a common question is how much “advanced” functionality to build in, and how much to let the users create themselves using a simple set of tools. For example, a reporting module could have many canned reports, or could have a tool which allows users to build reports themselves (or both). [...]
Software Design 101
Scott Rosenberg’s book Dreaming in Code, and the Code Reads section of blog have really inspired me to think and read more about my job. The “assigned reading” for Code Reads has been really great, so recently I started on a tangent – a book mentioned in Code Read 6, titled Bringing Design to [...]
Code Read 9 – John Backus and Functional Programming
The 1977 Turing Award went to John Backus, and in his Turing Lecture, “Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style?”, he made a vigorous case against traditional “von Neumann” programming (VNP), and for functional programming (FP). Unfortunately, the vigorous rhetorical style of this paper has infused the discussion of FP, resulting in [...]
Code Read 8 – Eric S Raymond’s Cathedral and Bazaar
The ever evolving “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” by Eric S Raymond (aka CatB) has become something of a lengthy read. Scott Rosenberg’s Code Read 8 dives on in, and rightly describes it as a “classic essay” and says it “has proved its importance” in the literature of software development. I first read [...]
