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 Bardem’s most remarkable roles) was a terrible idea. After a few seconds of...

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 about OOP by Borland’s founder Philippe Kahn. In the Library section, we review...

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 thankfully available on the Internet Archive at the time of this writing. Both of...

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 magazine, in which Steve Jobs would demonstrate how to build an application using...

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 Creators of Major Programming Languages” by Federico Biancuzzi and Shane Warden,...

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 how C and C++ manage memory in a video by Ryan Baker. In the Library section, we...

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, creator of the LLVM compiler infrastructure and the Swift programming language,...

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 loss. In “The Prestige” (2006), memory is self-deception. Dom Cobb, in...

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 their daily work; let alone computer scientists, or developers working in native...

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 science reading “Spreadsheet Physics” by Charles Misner and Patrick Cooney. In...

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 application. There is arguably more structured data stored in spreadsheets than in any...

Today we are going to talk about a person in a quest to let everyone know that the most popular functional programming language in the world is none other than Microsoft Excel. Yes, the claim sounds outlandish, debatable, laughable, even ridiculous, but she has both data and anecdotal experience backing her point,...