Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programmers

Carrying on from Episode 16, I wonder whether it matters that Apple switch to RISC-V next decade anyway. Sophie Wilson’s talk on the future of microprocessors Huang’s Law, saying that GPUs are improving at machine learning applications faster than CPUs are improving

In this episode I predict Apple’s transition to the RISC-V CPU architecture. "[Clive Sinclair] was an irascible man who was always charging up and down shouting and throwing his slide rule around" BBC Micro Men, on Sinclair and Chris Curry’s relationship The BBC Computer Literacy Programme ARM founder Hermann Hauser: sale to Nvidia "would be […]

In this episode, I work out how to use a computer to store and operate on numbers. I think it could catch on. I got the descriptions of endianness the wrong way around! When I talk about the order of bytes in a big-endian storage, I’m actually describing little-endian storage. Sorry!

In which I talk about various ways of packaging software and getting it onto your users’ computers. You probably won’t notice, but I got the episode number wrong, and corrected it flawlessly in post-production. Along the way, I mentioned: Solaris Packages BSD ports and packages, for example FreeBSD Ports Debian Packaging Homebrew Flatpak Snapcraft CTAN […]

In this episode, I discuss Bertrand Meyer’s Open-Closed Principle.

Having over-run on the previous episode, here’s the end of it, where I actually get as far as discussing No Silver Bullet—Essence and Accident in Software Engineering. This is a really great article about how no single improvement to software development practices is likely to provide an order-of-magnitude improvement in capability. Brad Cox asked What […]

In this episode I talk about The Mythical Man-Month and Brooks’s Law, even though I intended to talk about No Silver Bullet by the same author. Next time. Maybe. Exploratory experimental studies comparing online and offline programming performance, a.k.a. the source of the “10x programmer” myth. Leprechauns of Software Engineering, a book by Laurent Bossavit […]

This episode is all about build systems! Full show notes.

I talk about my experience with design by contract and my two implementations, in ObjC/Swift and Java. Full show notes.

In this episode, I investigate how messaging works in Smalltalk-80 and other languages. I don't talk about how OOP is realised in Lisp using generic functions, but do set further reading for those interested: The Art of the Metaobject Protocol.