Attacking Supply Chains at the Source
We’ve been very lucky. A couple of weeks ago, a supply-chain attack against the Linux xz Utils package, which includes the liblzma compression library, was discovered just weeks before the…
The General Purpose Pendulum
Pendulums do what they do: they swing one way, then they swing back the other way. Some oscillate quickly; some slowly; and some so slowly you can watch the earth…
Communal Computing’s Many Problems
In the first article of this series, we discussed communal computing devices and the problems they create–or, more precisely, the problems that arise because we don’t really understand what “communal”…
Thinking About Glue
In Glue: the Dark Matter of Software, Marcel Weiher asks why there’s so much code. Why is Microsoft Office 400 million lines of code? Why are we always running into…
Hand Labeling Considered Harmful
We are traveling through the era of Software 2.0, in which the key components of modern software are increasingly determined by the parameters of machine learning models, rather than hard-coded…
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…
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,…
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…
Automated Coding and the Future of Programming
At Microsoft’s Build conference, Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott talked about an experimental project in which an AI, trained on code in GitHub, actually creates programs: it generates function bodies based…