The Quality of Auto-Generated Code
Kevlin Henney and I were riffing on some ideas about GitHub Copilot, the tool for automatically generating code base on GPT-3’s language model, trained on the body of code that’s…
Two economies. Two sets of rules.
At one point early this year, Elon Musk briefly became the richest person in the world. After a 750% increase in Tesla’s stock market value added over $180 billion to…
Code as Infrastructure
A few months ago, I was asked if there were any older technologies other than COBOL where we were in serious danger of running out of talent. They wanted me…
DeepCheapFakes
Back in 2019, Ben Lorica and I wrote about deepfakes. Ben and I argued (in agreement with The Grugq and others in the infosec community) that the real danger wasn’t…
Checking Jeff Bezos’s Math
“If you want to be successful in business (in life, actually), you have to create more than you consume. Your goal should be to create value for everyone you interact…
The Wrong Question
“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.” Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow The deplatforming of Donald Trump and his alt-right coterie has…
Patterns
A few months ago, I said that “making everything into a design pattern is a sign that you don’t know what design patterns really are.” So now, I feel obliged…
What is functional programming?
It has long seemed to me that functional programming is, essentially, programming viewed as mathematics. Many ideas in functional programming came from Alonzo Church’s Lambda Calculus, which significantly predates anything…
On Exactitude in Technical Debt
If software is such stuff as dreams are made on, how do we talk about nightmares? Software is not the tangible, kickable stuff our senses are tuned to, so we…
Multi-Paradigm Languages
The programming world used to be split into functional languages, object-oriented languages, and everything else (mostly procedural languages). One “was” a functional programmer (at least as a hobby) writing Lisp,…