Don’t dismiss the spreadsheet. It not only brought programming to the masses, but was an early entry into rapid application development, functional programming and an easy and natural approach to parallel programming, reactive programming and cellular automata.
Software Development
There are 89 posts filed in Software Development (this is page 5 of 9).
Written by Michael Metcalf, John Reid and Malcolm Cohen, all leading experts in the field, two of whom have actively contributed to Fortran 2018, this is a complete and authoritative description of Fortran in its latest form.
Some things just keep on movin’….
In the early 2000’s, parents began noticing that educators were no longer interested in teaching their children about computers in ways that would lead them to get excited about pursuing computer-related careers like computer science and computer engineering. The problem was explained in a famous 2006 essay by the well-known astrophysicist and science fiction writer David Brin, Why Johnny can’t code. As the essay mentions, Brin could not find a modern computer and modern software capable of teaching children the BASIC computer programming language at a level they can understand. So, he solved the problem by buying a used computer from the 1980’s that came with BASIC already installed.
Link to David Brin article
BASIC used to be on every computer a child touched — but today there’s no easy way for kids to get hooked on programming.
Contents Contents Preamble I have little to say that’s of general value and haven’t found the time to level up My theory of bootstrapping The Rules Meta Rule 1: Rules are good Productivity and learning Rule 2: Most of what I learn is useless outside of its immediate context Rule 3: Focus “lear…
An essay from an Amazon developer looking to improve his skills, he shares his experiences at Amazon in a set of programming rules.
“I’m not a 10x developer….I was not That Guy overachieving on nights and weekends….In summary, I am a 1x developer. I do enough to get by respectably.”
This is a list of people who influence how I think, not only about JavaScript, but also about writing code for a living. If you don’t follow these folks, I encourage you to do so. For each person, I provide links to their Twitter profile as well as some
I am going to add these individuals to my RSS reader…good stuff!
A tutorial on COBOL, with links to GNUCobol – neat!
Is there still hope for COBOL programmers?
Recently, Joseph Steinberg noted that the governor of New Jersey put out a call for COBOL programmers to assist in updating or fixing business applications being used by the state for unemployment applications. I last wrote about this in June 2019 , after seeing an article about COBOL expertise being still in demand by financial institutions. I decided to look and see if there were any resources available for someone to get familiar with COBOL. It turns out that Micro Force is a company that has up-to-date COBOL development environments and compilers, OpenSource.com lists several compilers available (gnuCOBOL seems to be the significant one (documentation here)), and there is a beginning COBOL programming book available from Apress. Looks like there may be some opportunity here (at least according to Indeed.com ….).
Thoughts from a user
After listening to Dave Winer’s voicemailcast today, I decided to create my own in response. I used Little Outliner to create a set of show notes (link), the podcast is shown below. Let me know what you think…anyone, anyone at all….
Link to Internet Archive version of show notes
Paying for the development of software
I recently read a post on funding of software developed for academic/research use, the author stated that many grants are for new applications, and that funding agencies should consider supporting existing open source software that goes unfunded. There were links to papers such as the development of AstroPy, and a report by Nadia Eghbal on funding of Internet digital infrastructure development. I have touched on this topic before in a recent post about the development/funding story of the Node Package Manager. All of these stories touch on some common problems:
- People write software, put it out on the web, people use it or they don’t.
- If a lot of people start using it, and start asking for features/fixes, how do those get done? How do the developers get reimbursed for their time and effort?
- What if a business uses open source software at no direct cost? How can they depend on that software being supported and available?
Businesses that develop physical products that contain custom software pay for that software as part of the development cost of the product. This may be the best example of funding for software development.
To me, the idea of a subscription fee makes the most sense. The user paying a fee gets a specified level of support, for example, or early access to new versions. The developer gets a steadier stream of income than one-time payments (like for smartphone apps). There are other problems to address that I am not going to solve in this post, but people who develop applications should consider these topics before starting (they should “count the costs”).