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.
Latest Posts
Welcome to the 89th issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, about Ruby. We are thrilled to welcome Graham back to the newsroom! We are also introducing “Arts”, a new category exploring the connection between programming and the arts. In this...
I think of NeXTSTEP as one of the best compromises ever pulled off by the commercial computing industry. Xerox’s PARC laboratory showed people Smalltalk and the Personal Dynabook, giving people in the late 1970s one possible vision of...
The list of acceptance criteria for papers submitted to the 4th History of Programming Languages (HOPL) conference held in 2021 were the following: they had to refer to languages created before 2009, that were widely used around 2011,...
It is seemingly impossible to talk about Ruby without talking about Rails, and this article will not be the exception. This web framework has had a both terrific and terrible (some would say oversized) influence in the past 20 years, and...
Most people traverse this industry in silence, duly writing, debugging, and deploying their code in whatever way ensures their salary or stock option grants; some others become unexpected stars in a firmament that would otherwise be dull...
Programming languages have settled into a comfortable middle age, with most coming to resemble one another. Many use some variety of ALGOL-derived structure, maybe with the occasional feature that first made its appearance in a LISP...
Welcome to the 88th issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, about Containers. In this edition: We realize that an Internet meme encapsulated the whole truth about containers all along. In our Vidéothèque section, we watch the introduction of...
The analogy between intermodal containers and software containers sounds cliché, but it works pretty well, which is the reason why we will keep using it in this article. Let us recap: before the standardization around intermodal...
Around 2004 I was working as a .NET software developer, building custom applications for a rather large Swiss customer who shall remain nameless. As part of the engagement, we had to not only write said software application following...
It is easy to forget, in our age of AI and LLMs and slop and coding agents, that merely 10 years ago the “cloud” and “DevOps” and “containers” were all the rage. It seems like a century ago, yet it was not only during the 21st century,...
Welcome to the 87th issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, about Considered Harmful. In this edition: We weigh the historical and philosophical implications of the phrase “Considered Harmful”. In our Vidéothèque section, we watch Phil Nash...
We, the authors of the magazine you are reading right now, sometimes joke that the true legacy of these articles would be realized if someone presented a paper titled “De Programmatica Ipsum Considered Harmful”. Alas (or not), we do not...
A quick search on YouTube with the query “Considered Harmful” is a revealing exercise. The number and variety of articles thereby returned is outstanding and, to a certain extent, hilarious. The day I wrote this article I had the...
In a key scene of the 2012 blockbuster James Bond film “Skyfall”, MI6 quartermaster Q, played by Ben Whishaw, realizes too late that plugging a cable into the laptop of a notoriously skilled terrorist like Raoul Silva (one of Javier...
Welcome to the 86th issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, about Borland. In this edition: We explain to younger generations what the name “Borland” meant to older cohorts of software engineers. In our Vidéothèque section, we watch a video...