Computer Things: 2019-2020
Computer Things: 2019-2020
About the Book
A compilation of all Computer Things newsletter essays in 2019 and 2020, including essays that were for subscribers only. Some of the public essays include:
- The most expensive software per byte
- How everybody misunderstood the "Literate Programming vs Unix Philosophy" 'debate'
- How knowing math helps you write better software
- Why blaming defects on "programmers" and not the broader system is a waste of time.
Some of the private essays include:
- Why Vim is a bad representation of what a "modal editor" is
- The difference between "code" clever and "insightful" clever
- Fringetech
- Multiple first drafts of essays that eventually went on my official website.
Formatting is a bit wonky on account of being a straight markdown-to-leanpub conversion; I'm in the process of fixing those up. Some administrative material was pruned, otherwise all essays are left as-is. Thank you for reading!
About the Author
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- The kind of thing this is gonna be
- On Hating Your Tools
- New Post: Formally Modeling Database Migrations
- On Documentation
- Data and Reality, 2nd Edition
- Software isn’t designed for power users
- Automation vs Augmentation
-
New Post! Plus Upkeep
- New Post: How Fast Do I Talk?
- The Crossover Project
- Link: A Cool Game
- We Are Not Special
-
Canonical Examples
- Newsletter Links
- Back on Windows
- What is a “beautiful” proof?
-
A few smaller updates
- Ethnography of antipatterns
- Crossover project update
- New Essay! (Also Workshop Field Notes)
- Workshop Improvements
- Increment Magazine
- Science Turf War
-
Computer Things: YOW Roundup Edition
- YOW
- Why Python is my Favorite Language
-
Why Python Is My Favorite Language
- Solving this
-
On Marketing Formal Methods
- Marketing Formal Methods
- Back up your arguments plz
- Bill Kentstravaganza
-
New Essay, Intentional Errors, and a TLA+ CLI
- New Essay
- Intentional Errors
- TLA+ CLI
- Three Ways Juggling is Like Programming
- A Totally Polished and not-at-all half-baked Take on Static vs Dynamic Typing
- New Essay: The Business Case For Formal Methods
- On Emulation
-
Project updates, request for help, braindump
- Random Thoughts
- New Essay: Feature Interaction Bugs
-
10 Most(ly dead) important programming languages (first draft)
- tlacli now a python package
- First draft
-
Happy Precedence Day!
- Formal Methods Tweetstorm
- Precedence is weird
-
Donald Knuth Was Framed
- YOW! Talk
- Donald Knuth Was Framed
-
On Scaling Mental Models
- No Newsletter Next Week
- The Actual Thing
- The Opposite of Documentation is Superstition
-
Online Workshops, Project Updates, New Post
- Leo Trip Report
- On Customization
-
Special Purpose Languages
- Github acquires NPM
- Special Purpose Languages
-
Please don’t write your documentation in Markdown
- What to use instead
-
Language Warts and Vim Trix
- New(ish post)
- Language Warts
-
What’s the Most Expensive Software Per Byte?
- Expensive
- Small
- Small and Expensive
- Very Small and Very Expensive
- Small and Hideously Expensive
- Conclusion
- Update 2020-04-03
-
A Very Brief Intro to Formal Methods (aka my job)
- Formal Methods
-
Announcing Alloydocs, updates on major projects
- Alloydocs
- What’s Next
- Making Illegal States Unrepresentable
-
Workshop Announcement, Vim is a bad modal editor
- Vim is a bad modal editor
- Better modal editors
-
New Essay, Office Hours, and a short essay
- New Essay
- Terse Programming Languages
-
Sneak Peek: Constructive vs Predicative Data
- Techniques for constructive solutions
- Thoughts
- How I Write Talks
- Rage Against the God Machine
-
New Essay: In Praise of AutoHotKey
- New Essay: In Praise of AutoHotKey
- Nothing else for now
-
If Inheritance is so bad, why does everyone use it?
- Some thoughts on first-generation solutions
-
Workshop Innovations and New Website Essay
- New essay: constructive versus predicative data
- Workshop innovations
- Defects are not the fault of programmers
- Some Ranting About Examples
- Monads and Transducers are Literally 100% The Same Thing
- New TLA+ Workshop, New PBT Essay
-
Understanding Fairness
- Stuttering
- Strong fairness
- Thoughts
-
Why You Should Always Blindly Chase Industry Trends
- “Are we really engineers” video now available
-
Why You Should Always Blindly Chase Industry Trends
- Disclaimers
- Technical Benefits
- Career Benefits
- Personal Benefits
- Conclusion
-
Situated Software
- New essay
- Situated software
-
I have become ideas guy
- Random Thoughts
-
Merchants on the Ivory Road
- Merchants on the Ivory Road
-
J sieves as a tool of thought
- J sieves as a tool of thought
- Sieves
- Syntax highlighting is a waste of an information channel
-
New essay and some thoughts on humility
- New essay
- On Humility
- Software correctness is a lot like flossing
-
How knowing math helps you write better software
- Bonus: De Morgan’s Paradoxes
-
Test Inference
- Miscellaneous thoughts
-
New Essay and a Very Peculiar Optimization
- New Essay
- Storing Sorts
- Discussion
-
What’s the Deal with Message Passing, Anyway
- Tweetstorms
- Please read the paper before you comment
-
Formal Specification Languages
- Conclusion
- Tweetstorms
-
Treasure Hunting in the Noosphere
- Office Hours
- Fringetech
- Tweetstorms
-
Finding Go Concurrency Bugs with TLA+
- Discussion
- That Time I Almost Joined a Software Cult
-
Write Notes for Your Code
- New Essay
- Write Notes For Your Code
- Updates on the Crossover Project
-
Software Engineers Don’t Have Disciplines
- What is a discipline?
-
New essay, new “book” thingy
- New Essay
- New “Book”: Graveyard
- Mystery Knowledge
-
We’re Bad at SAT Solvers
- We’re bad at SAT Solvers
-
We have met the Excelnemy and he is us
- Whoops on SAT
-
Edge Case Poisoning
- Addressing edge case poisoning
-
The Pendulum Swings Eternal
- Alloy Stream
- The Pendulum Swings Eternal
- Sneak Peek: Two Workers are Quadratically Better than One
-
Two Workers are Quadratically Better than one
- Planning Ahead
- Specifying Throughput
- Specifying Latency
- Two Workers
- Generalizing the Model
- Conclusion
- TLA+ Helped Me Count to Six
-
New Essay, Universal Examples, Old Essay
- Universal examples
-
Programs Writing Programs
- New Essay
-
Programs Writing Programs
- Other uses
- Misc
-
No, your clean code won’t save the planet
- Why do people do this?
- Why I Still Use Vim
-
Weird Examples and Weird Tools
- Weird Examples
- Weird Tools
-
Knights, Puzzles, and Hypermodels
- Knights, Puzzles, and Hypermodels
- There’s always more history
- Computer Things: Vacation Phone-In Edition
-
Safety and Liveness Properties
- Limitations of LTL
- Exotic Properties
- Oracle Testing
-
New Essay, New Workshop, Thoughts on Cleverness
- On Cleverness
-
The Most Important Video Game Ever Made
- The Most Important Video Game Ever Made
- Cross-Branch Testing
- Notes
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