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
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...
On November 1988, Byte Magazine published two separate editions; first, the standard monthly issue, focused on the newly introduced NeXT computer; and the “Fifth Annual Extra All-IBM Issue” focused on the IBM PC, both of which are...
How did companies sell Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) to the masses back in the early 1990s, during the “Peak Of Inflated Expectations” of the OOP hype cycle? We have already seen such an example in the Vidéothèque section of this...
Among all the books featured in the Library section of this magazine, there is one that has been mentioned particularly often, again and again. We are talking about the excellent “Masterminds of Programming: Conversations with the...
Welcome to the 85th issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, about Memory Management, starting our 8th volume. In this edition: We look at the strategies used by major programming languages to manage memory. In our Vidéothèque section, we learn...
On Monday, June 6th, 2011, after Steve Jobs’ last public appearance as a keynote speaker, took place the “Developer Tools Kickoff” session at Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference, also known as WWDC. That day, Chris Lattner,...
The filmography of Christopher Nolan runs along a common thread: a never-ending obsession with human memory. In “Memento” (2000), Leonard Shelby must solve the horrendous rape and murder of his wife while dealing with short-term memory...
This month’s Vidéothèque movie provides a (very) short and simple introduction to the subject of memory architecture. But this is not, by far, the minimum any software developer should know about memory segmentation and management for...
Welcome to the 84th issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, about Spreadsheets. In this edition: We declare spreadsheets the most popular software programming environment of all time. In the Library section, we learn how to use Lotus 1-2-3 for...
Spreadsheets are the de facto most popular programming environment ever created. Purchase decisions for entire families of personal computers have been made solely on the availability (or lack thereof) of a particular spreadsheet...