It’s not uncommon for any of us to trade our personal freedoms for various perks. As a most well-known example, in most modern societies it’s expected to give up one’s freedom to use force in exchange for a safer society altogether. And it makes sense: if it’s not corrupt, letting the state own a monopoly on the use of force is a net positive for everyone. We are significantly more cautious when a…
Theory goes that a lot what was accomplished in computer science was actually accomplished due to the laziness of the actors involved. And it’s not hard to find examples supporting that theory, but my favorite is about programmers in the 50s that didn’t like writing their programs in assembly language, so they invented new programming language(s) and accompanying tools (compilers) to translate…
It looks like there is a growing push towards going back to distributing software as native binaries. However, it also looks that programmers these days seem to forget why we moved from native to bytecode binaries in the first place (maybe because the ones that still have that experience all migrated to management?). It’s not that native code doesn’t have any advantages, but far from it that it’s…
Every programmer knows that the only stable product is a dead product. Live products, on the other hand, constantly evolve to adapt to changing markets, new users or both.
As programmers, most of us are intimidated by big, complex problems. And since most of us are a bit cocky too (in a positive way!) we are often inclined to dismiss inherited complex products and technologies as “old” or “bloated” and tend to solve every problem with “refactor” using some “new technology”. Similarly, we tend to dismiss as “not needed” most of the things we don’t understand. Don’t…
I’m old, and one benefit of being old is that I’ve seen things. I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Ori… Ok, maybe not those things, but still… things. And let me tell you something about one thing I believe many of us should be more aware of.