Skip to content

Category Archives: Software development

The problem with standards

Standardised formats are essential to connections in the digital society. On the hardware side, USB is so ubiquitous and well defined that I can connect essentially any peripheral to any PC. In many cases I can even expect them to work without drivers. For sound, the 3.5 mm headphone plug has been ubiquitous as long […]

Posted 04 June 2009 † johan § ‡ Comments (3) ° Tagged: ,

Exploring Scala

I’ve started experimenting with the programming language Scala. I’ve been wanting to get back into functional programming for some time, but I’ve found it impractical for the time being to dive right into something like ML, Haskell or Scheme. Scala has gained notoriety since Twitter announced that they’ve rewritten their engine in it. Some of […]

Posted 08 May 2009 † johan § ‡ Comments (1) ° Tagged: ,

The textual paradigm

Following up on yesterday’s post on code reuse, I have a more specific reason to be skeptical of literate programming. Programming and software development is stuck in a textual paradigm – the idea that programming is something you do by writing text in a formal language. I think this idea constrains us somewhat in the […]

Posted 01 May 2009 † johan § ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: ,

Code reuse according to Knuth

I stumbled upon this interview with Donald Knuth today. In addition to the celebrated The Art of Computer Programming, Donald Knuth pioneered the concept of literate programming, which emphasises writing code for human beings to understand, as opposed to writing it for machines to understand. When being asked about current trends and fashionable practices that have […]

Posted 30 April 2009 † johan § ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: