Welcome to the 97th issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, about File Systems, starting our 9th volume. In this edition: Graham wonders whether the idea of a hierarchical file system makes sense at all in 2026. Adrian goes back in time to find the origin of the “everything is a file” moniker. In our Vidéothèque section,...

The hierarchical file system—a directed graph database that is not quite an adirected tree—in which every node is either a container of other nodes that has no content itself (a folder, or directory, or drawer for those lucky enough to work with Amiga Workbench) or a leaf node that has content but no other nodes (a...

In page 227 of the wonderful book “The Dream Machine” by M. Mitchell Waldrop, covered in a previous issue, telling the story of the early development of computers, we can learn that Fernando Corbató and his team were busy in 1965 adding a new feature to CTSS, the first interactive and multi-user operating system for...

There is a sense of vertigo when one watches the 1982 documentary “The UNIX Operating System”, preserved on YouTube by the AT&T Archives channel. For anyone interested in the archaeology of our craft, it acts as a portal into an era where computer science was still wearing diapers. We see Brian Kernighan typing...

Good technical documentation does not need to provide drama, though some people manage to introduce that anyway—consider the second edition of Object-Oriented Software Construction by Bertrand Meyer, which builds up a case, like a consulting detective in a crime fiction novel, for a programming language based on a...

Welcome to the 96th issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, about Software Factories. In this edition: Graham makes us realize that you cannot get rid of programmers. Adrian is dismayed reviewing the history of Software Factories. In our Vidéothèque section, we listen to Damon Edwards tell us the story of how the DevOps...

Almost since the dawn of programming (certainly since before the 1969 NATO Science Committee conference on software engineering techniques), software managers have been looking for ways to create programs without relying on programmers. In addition to being expensive to hire (at least if you are not asking about...

One of the oldest and wettest dreams of managers since the invention of the computer has been that of getting rid of that pesky layer of human programmers in their organizations. A lot has been written about the psychology of programmers, about how to deal with them as human beings, and about how the dialog between...

DevOps is, by far, the closest thing we have to a software factory at the time of this writing. We had dedicated a whole issue to DevOps in January 2020, but this month’s topic makes it a natural object of interest. The analogy goes so deep that even the word “pipeline” fits into the world of DevOps like a glove....

I guarantee you have used software that is the output of a Software Product Line. If you have got an Android phone, tablet, or audio player; use Linux on your desktop, laptop, set-top box, smart home device, Wi-fi router, server, or cloud computing provider; or you use a web application that is hosted on Linux, then...

The library of a programmer who has been in the craft for a few decades is a wonderful thing. Although the consumption patterns have somewhat shifted from paper to electronic books, there is always room on their shelf for those forgotten books that represent ideas from another age. This Library entry is just a...

Welcome to the 95th issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, about Fortran. In this edition: Graham explains the wonders of a programming language that has been able to adapt in an ever-changing world. Adrian enumerates many of the wrong reasons why FORTRAN/Fortran is not at the forefront of computing today. In our...