Michael Fogus's Blog, page 4

8-bit Spirituals

An 8-bit Spiritual (8BS) is a modern program that hearkens back to a time when applications provided a robust experience but fit onto a single floppy disk. Modern apps are bloated by comparison, but there are applications that fit the spirit of the 8-bit days. That said, a modern 8BS should provide a minimal set […]

Walking the Clojure Source History (a talk not given)

Years ago I planned to give a talk centered around exploring the Clojure source history to find interesting buried artifacts. In service to that goal I walked every commit in the repository to see what I could find. There were indeed interesting discoveries, but eventually my passion for giving the talk1 dissipated. However, I recent […]

The Devil’s Programming Glossary: Thought-bleater

thought-bleater noun A person who shares their thoughts because they had them. see also: thought-leader

The Best Things and Stuff of 2019

Great things and people that I discovered, learned, read, met, etc. in 2019. No particular ordering is implied. Not everything is new. also: see the lists from 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011 and 2010 Great blog-posts / articles read The Norwegian Art of the Packed Lunch – I’ve tried to be more […]

Privacy Lost

Ola Bini has been arrested by the Ecuadorian Police based on questionable links to Julian Assange and Wikileaks. Although he has been arrested, no charges against him have yet been filed. Near to the time of Ola’s arrest the Ecuadorian police tweeted an obscured photo of a person in detention and that person’s personal belongings, […]

Notes on Interactive Computing Environments

In the pantheon of my personal favorite books on computing, Interactive Programming Environments by Barstow1, Shrobe, and Sandewall places somewhere in the proverbial chancel. The book covers a wide range of topics from Lisp Machines, Smalltalk, Pascal, OOP, UNIX, AI, and intelligent agents but the common thread is this: Your programming environments should be an […]

A city is not a tree

While reading Christopher Alexander’s amazing essay “A City is Not a Tree” I was reminded of a page in one of my old notebooks. On that page I had taken some notes on some amazing computer science (and related) dissertations that might form the basis for a personal program design gestalt.1 In this post I’ll […]

The best things and stuff of 2018

Great things and people that I discovered, learned, read, met, etc. in 2018. No particular ordering is implied. Not everything is new. also: see the lists from 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011 and 2010 Great blog-posts / articles read One Windows Kernel – While I’m also a sucker for all things osdev1, my […]

Starboy

While listening to Starboy by The Weekend I’m reminded about some codebases that I have to dive into more deeply. When reading codebases, be they for fun or profit, I tend to take a systematic approach to exposing them, described as: Get it building and running – not always as easy as it should/could be. […]

Soup

As I listen to “Soup” by Can I’m reminded of the time when Alan Kay took some time to post on Hacker News addressing his thoughts and ideas about object-oriented programming. For raw context read the original thread, but in this post I’ll attempt to annotate some of what was posted. For the purpose of […]