De Programmatica Ipsum
De Programmatica Ipsum
Adrian Kosmaczewski
De Programmatica Ipsum is a monthly magazine about programming and society published since 2018. No AI content, no ads, no paywall, full RSS feed, 100% supported by our readers.
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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...
According to Geoffrey Cain’s book “Steve Jobs in Exile”, the titular entrepreneur told employees at his NeXT startup that were working on their first workstation that their platform would last maybe into the mid-1990s. All computing...
On page 168 of the April 1988 issue of BYTE Magazine, available online courtesy of the extraordinary Internet Archive, we can read an article introducing “two new compilers” for the FORTRAN (still all in uppercase) programming language....
In an era where your favorite JavaScript runtime is rewritten in Rust by an LLM bored at lunchtime, and we need gigabytes of RAM to render a chat application, it is remarkably humbling to look back at the primordial soup of programming....
Plenty of books in my programming library are a bit battered and dog-eared. “Tim Hartnell’s GIANT Book of Computer Games” has almost no spine left, having been cracked open multiple times in my childhood while I typed one of its BASIC...
One of the perks of running a magazine like this one consists of discovering hidden pearls in the history of computing and how these connect to one another in uncanny ways. Take, for example, the case of this month’s Library choice: a...
Welcome to the 94th issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, about Killer Apps. In this edition: Graham argues that the “Killer App” phenomenon is in danger of extinction. Adrian enumerates some examples of “App Killers”. In our Vidéothèque...
I have more experience with situations where apps have already done the killing, than I have with being onboard with a killer app. I never used VisiCalc, for example, joining the spreadsheet revolution long after the field was already...
The name “Killer App” says a lot about the level of violence in the world of business (well, in the world in general). Such a piece of software is dubbed a “killer” if it somehow triggers a massive uptick in the adoption of its...
Archival footage from the early 1980s has this distinct, almost palpable texture to it. For members of Generation X, it brings memories of Donkey Kong, He-Man, and Star Wars. The colors are slightly washed out, the audio hums with the...
The mid-1980s was the era when the personal computing vendors ended their war on themselves. In the belligerent phase, every time a vendor released a new computer, it was incompatible with everything that came before it. In “Where Are...
Welcome to the 93rd issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, about Functional Programming. In this edition: Graham explains the benefits of solving problems with a functional mindset. Adrian explores why functional programming was shunned until...
Programming styles are supposed to be paradigmatic, in that they structure your thinking about creating software by providing unifying theories and methods that you use to plan, design, construct, and operate your software. In that...
In a famous paper published in 1998, Philip Wadler complained that no one used functional programming languages. It is safe to say that in 2026 everybody is using some kind of functional programming language, albeit to a certain extent,...
If there was a contest for the single most beloved person in the functional programming galaxy, Joe Armstrong would have effortlessly won the first prize. For decades, he constantly showed the world that the principles behind functional...