IEEE Computer (PDF): In a February 1995 article, “A Plea for Lean Software”, Niklaus Wirth (inventor of Pascal and Modula-2) laments the size growth in software applications, and calls out time pressure and lack of good design as possible reasons for this growth. In the second half of the article, he discusses his own solution for this problem (Project Oberon) which comprises an operating system, a compiler and a computer. To me, this was a good approach to take from an academic standpoint, but I do not think this had any effect on the mainstream practice of software development (similar in nature to Donald Knuth’s concept of literate programming). A second version of Oberon was released in 2013 (see link below).

Project Oberon – Website linking to Oberon book PDFs and other artifacts

Niklaus Wirth – Home page

Some Javascript file handling links:

Writing files:

Eli Grey: Article describing his library FileSave.js

Demo 1: FileSaver.js demo of saving text from a HTML text area

Demo 2: FileSaver.js demo of saving a string in a blob

Github: Source for FileSaver.js

Reading the contents of files:

Treehouse: Several examples of opening files and displaying the contents in a web page

HTML5 Rocks: Multiple examples of opening files

NCZOnline: Code-only examples, no live demos

 

Cooperative Software Development: An online book by Dr. Andrew Ko at the University of Washington, this work focuses on “the human aspects of software engineering for students interested in becoming software engineers.” (from the home page). The book covers a number of topics within the software engineering realm (requirements, process, even debugging). Each of the chapters contain footnotes for further reading. I thought it was a good view into a number of areas, based on his academic lectures and his own experience as a CTO for a startup (AnswerDash).

Software Engineering Daily: A podcast on software engineering topics, the past episode list looks interesting, will add this to my subscription list in PocketCasts.