Procedural Programming: It's Back? It Never Went Away
Kevlin Henney·2018·ACCU·1 hrHenney goes back to the sixties to show that 'procedural' was never the slur we made it into — and that much of what we call modern style is older than we think.
Seven Ineffective Coding Habits of Many Programmers
Kevlin Henney·2016·NDCKevlin Henney dissects seven things programmers do reflexively — noisy comments, getters and setters, lego-naming — and what to do instead.
Null References: The Billion Dollar Mistake
Tony Hoare·2009·QConLondonTony Hoare apologises for inventing the null reference in ALGOL W in 1965 — and traces the decades of crashes, bugs, and security holes that decision quietly seeded.
The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet
Alan Kay·1997·OOPSLAAlan Kay's OOPSLA keynote on how far we still are from the medium computers could be — and how much of what we call 'OOP' missed the point.
Stop Writing Dead Programs
Jack Rusher·2022·Strange LoopJack Rusher argues that most of our languages are still, accidentally, designed around the punchcard — and shows what a living programming environment could look like instead.
The Wet Codebase
Dan Abramov·2019·DeconstructAbramov on what DRY actually costs once you've lived with a too-clever abstraction — and why writing the same code twice is sometimes the right answer.
10 Things I Regret About Node.js
Ryan Dahl·2018·JSConfEURyan Dahl revisits the design decisions he wishes he could undo in Node — and uses the postmortem to introduce Deno.