Programming is about translating what a human wants into instructions a computer can understand. Or is it? Thinking down this path, there are two ends of a programming language spectrum. A language can be close to the computer’s perspective: imperative languages that declare data, move and store data, carry out instructions in a fixed order. At …
If we understand the reasons, the story behind the requirements, we can implement them much more effectively. Then we know which pieces are important and which we shouldn’t spend weeks obsessively getting letter perfect. We can make a guess at what will change, and we know where performance is critical. In relationships, if we know …
Taking computers as the universe, where hardware determines the laws of nature and binary data are the basic substrate, we can understand the world bottom-up. We know at each level of abstraction, at each size of particle, what rules the components follow. Binary composes to assembler, which follows rules according to the CPU’s construction. Assembler …
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If organisms are programs, then DNA is our source code. Some people attempt to measure the complexity of an organism by the number of base pairs in its DNA. For instance, the human genome is 250x longer than the yeast genome. Makes sense. But then, the amoeba genome is 225x longer than the human genome[1]. …
The status code you want to get from Microsoft: ERROR_SUCCESS. Or the next best, ERROR_SUCCESS_REBOOT_INITIATED. Often in life our biggest victories, the best surprises, come out of failure to get what we thought we wanted. And the best successes of all cause a reboot – a re-evaluation of what’s important, as we learn whole new parts …
With centralized control, we’re limited to what we can hold in our heads. A centralized economy doesn’t work beyond a few hundred people. A free-agent-based economy can build far more at larger scales. A project controlled and understood by one person can only be so complex. A community of individuals can build something immensely greater …
We need to invent a word: ?: (n) The goal that you aim for, not because you expect to hit it, but because aiming for it points you in the right direction. Julian Browne in The Death of Architecture accepts that while an Enterprise Architecture will never be achieved, it can direct our efforts: “Great …
Michael O’Church has a lot to say about the functional programming community. His post, Functional Programming is a Ghetto (in the “isolated, exclusive neighborhood” sense of ghetto) contains some great descriptions of what goes through a programmer’s head after he or she learns to think in a functional style. The following is a paraphrase of …
Question: how can we track database schema upgrades? How can we make sure our database structure matches the deployed code? One answer: in Android’s SQLite database, they solve this problem by storing a version number in a database property. When an application opens a connection, the version number in the code is checked against …