Interesting recent readsA recurring theme has emerged in what I’ve been reading the last few days. It boils down to the differences between software based on a clean, logical algorithm, and software based on arbitrary rules.
The topic first arose in a conversation I was having with Chris Conway over at Code Reads, exploring the pros and [...]
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 [...]
In 1985, David Parnas resigned from his position on a panel convened by the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization, which was overseeing the “Star Wars”, or SDI anti-ballistic missile defense program. Along with his resignation he submitted several short essays explaining why he thought the software required for Star Wars could not be built, at [...]
This installment of Code Reads takes a huge leap from the world of academia and the historic foundations of our discipline to something more recent: Mitch Kapor’s Software Design Manifesto. In this passionate essay, Mitch Kapor extols the virtues of designing software with the user experience in mind, and advocates developing a profession of [...]
Code Reads 5 takes us from Dijkstra to Knuth, and his humorously titled “Structured Programming with Go To Statements“. In it, Knuth addresses how the field seems to have missed the real point of Dijkstra’s structured programming, and instead focused on mindlessly eliminating “go to” statements. Knuth quotes Hoare when saying the most [...]
