De Programmatica Ipsum
De Programmatica Ipsum
Adrian Kosmaczewski
De Programmatica Ipsum is a monthly magazine about programming and society published since 2018. No AI content, no ads, no paywall, full RSS feed, 100% supported by our readers.
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Programming languages have settled into a comfortable middle age, with most coming to resemble one another. Many use some variety of ALGOL-derived structure, maybe with the occasional feature that first made its appearance in a LISP...
Welcome to the 88th issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, about Containers. In this edition: We realize that an Internet meme encapsulated the whole truth about containers all along. In our Vidéothèque section, we watch the introduction of...
The analogy between intermodal containers and software containers sounds cliché, but it works pretty well, which is the reason why we will keep using it in this article. Let us recap: before the standardization around intermodal...
Around 2004 I was working as a .NET software developer, building custom applications for a rather large Swiss customer who shall remain nameless. As part of the engagement, we had to not only write said software application following...
It is easy to forget, in our age of AI and LLMs and slop and coding agents, that merely 10 years ago the “cloud” and “DevOps” and “containers” were all the rage. It seems like a century ago, yet it was not only during the 21st century,...
Welcome to the 87th issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, about Considered Harmful. In this edition: We weigh the historical and philosophical implications of the phrase “Considered Harmful”. In our Vidéothèque section, we watch Phil Nash...
We, the authors of the magazine you are reading right now, sometimes joke that the true legacy of these articles would be realized if someone presented a paper titled “De Programmatica Ipsum Considered Harmful”. Alas (or not), we do not...
A quick search on YouTube with the query “Considered Harmful” is a revealing exercise. The number and variety of articles thereby returned is outstanding and, to a certain extent, hilarious. The day I wrote this article I had the...
In a key scene of the 2012 blockbuster James Bond film “Skyfall”, MI6 quartermaster Q, played by Ben Whishaw, realizes too late that plugging a cable into the laptop of a notoriously skilled terrorist like Raoul Silva (one of Javier...
Welcome to the 86th issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, about Borland. In this edition: We explain to younger generations what the name “Borland” meant to older cohorts of software engineers. In our Vidéothèque section, we watch a video...
On November 1988, Byte Magazine published two separate editions; first, the standard monthly issue, focused on the newly introduced NeXT computer; and the “Fifth Annual Extra All-IBM Issue” focused on the IBM PC, both of which are...
How did companies sell Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) to the masses back in the early 1990s, during the “Peak Of Inflated Expectations” of the OOP hype cycle? We have already seen such an example in the Vidéothèque section of this...
Among all the books featured in the Library section of this magazine, there is one that has been mentioned particularly often, again and again. We are talking about the excellent “Masterminds of Programming: Conversations with the...
Welcome to the 85th issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, about Memory Management, starting our 8th volume. In this edition: We look at the strategies used by major programming languages to manage memory. In our Vidéothèque section, we learn...
On Monday, June 6th, 2011, after Steve Jobs’ last public appearance as a keynote speaker, took place the “Developer Tools Kickoff” session at Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference, also known as WWDC. That day, Chris Lattner,...