Software Development as a Collaborative Writing Project
Writing software is more like drafting legislation or writing a screenplay than
it is like engineering. Paper for XP2006.
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Pair Programming with the Users
Why write specifications when you can collaborate with the users on executable code?
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Industrial FP: A case study
A functional programming solution to interpreting a file from a mainframe.
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Liquid Mathematics
A review of Robert Bringhurst’s The Solid Form of Language.
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Remembering Ted Smith
An unsung English gentleman. We miss him.
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You Might Not Like Me When I’m Angry
Bruce Bannerman’s transformation into the raging green giant Hulk is a disturbing reflection
of America in the 21st century.
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The Experience of Being Understood
Requirement specification looks a lot
like language acquisition. Reflecting on what Wittgenstein had to say about language acquisition
suggests an unusual software development practice.
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Extreme Terseness
Research report presented at
XP2003, Genoa, May 2003.
Some languages are more agile than others.
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The Simple Art of Software
(Vector, 19.4, April 2003)
Extreme Programming
and the Agile Alliance
promote lightweight software development.
APL programmers will find much that is familiar.
In fact, agile development may offer a new context for APL in the 21st century.
But XP also has much that is new to us.
In this article I look at what XP can add to APL development projects —
and, in return, what APL brings to XP.
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A Place for Us
(Vector, 19.4, April 2003)
Enlarged from remarks at the end of the APL2002 conference in Madrid.
If our technology is what we say it is, why do we think it normal
for our customers to have an ‘exit strategy’ for APL?
Perfect Printing
(Vector, 19.2, October 2002)
APL software to write editable, printable Microsoft Word documents in RTF (Rich Text Format).
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Three Principles of Coding Clarity
(Vector, 18.4, April 2002)
Clarity usually matters more than execution speed. Certain coding practices promote clarity,
but as with natural languages, there are no rules you shouldn’t sometimes break.
Here I look beyond some familiar Do’s and Don’ts in search of general principles.
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Persistence and Shadows
(Vector, 18.2, October 2001)
Two changes are proposed to the definition of functions:
that local objects might retain their values when a function leaves the execution stack,
and that names might be shadowed by default rather than by declaration.
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Ki to Life
(Elle Australia, July 1997)
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My Wife Nearly Died of Fatigue
(Woman’s Day, Australia, July 1997)
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These two articles describe my then wife’s recovery from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS)
or myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) through
Chun Do Sun Bup training.
The One Tree
with Arthur Whitney, (APL84 Proceedings, ACM)
proposed object-oriented changes to APL inspired in part by the design of Smalltalk-80.