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,…
Our Favorite Questions
“On peut interroger n’importe qui, dans n’importe quel état; ce sont rarement les réponses qui apportent la vérité, mais l’enchaînement des questions.““You can interrogate anyone, no matter what their state…
AI and Creativity
The release of GPT-3 has reinvigorated a discussion of creativity and artificial intelligence. That’s a good discussion to have, primarily because it forces us to think carefully about what we…
Pair Programming with AI
In a conversation with Kevlin Henney, we started talking about the kinds of user interfaces that might work for AI-assisted programming. This is a significant problem: neither of us were…
An Agent of Change
The Covid-19 pandemic has changed how people and businesses spend and operate. Over the coming pages we’ll explore ways in which our current world is already very different from the…
The Least Liked Programming Languages
StackOverflow’s 2020 developer survey included a table showing the “most loved, dreaded, and wanted languages.” Loved and wanted languages are, well, sort of boring. The programming languages we dread are…
Power, Harms, and Data
A recent article in The Verge discussed PULSE, an algorithm for “upsampling” digital images. PULSE, when applied to a low-resolution image of Barack Obama, recreated a White man’s face; applied…