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 future of computing. This vision proposed that computing be made (morally)...

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, and that had great influence in other languages that followed. Let us be very...

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 has, against all odds, regained interest in a world of microservices, DevOps...

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 and uneventful. And since in this magazine we celebrate not only the...

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 variant. Execution starts at the beginning of the file, or the entry point function....

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 Docker by Solomon Hykes in 2013. In the Library section, we review “The Docker...

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 containers after the Second World War, freight had to be manually loaded and unloaded...

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 their requirements, but also deliver it in person. Yes, in person. We had to take a...

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, but it was almost yesterday. The sensation that time is flying is not anymore a...

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 explain which parts of OOP can be considered harmful. In the Library section, we...

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 think this is ever going to happen, although I know that some members of...

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 following ones popping up, all of which were literally considered harmful for the...