What can routers at Centre Pompidou teach us about software evolution?
Tomas Petricek's blog
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1y ago
Back in June, I was in Paris for the NewCrafts conference to talk about the growing opacity of software systems. This was fun, partly because NewCrafts is a fantastic conference (you can already get your tickets for 2024!) and also partly because my talk (arguing against many established "good engineering" practices) was in many ways arguing for the exact opposite than one of the keynotes, leading to many interesting conversations. While in Paris, I also visited the famous Centre Pompidou. Perhaps to the dismay of many modern art lovers, I spent a lot of time staring at the ceiling looking for ..read more
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Where programs live? Vague spaces and software systems
Tomas Petricek's blog
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1y ago
Architecture and urban planning have been a useful source of ideas for thinking about programming. I have written various blog posts and a paper Programming as Architecture, Design, and Urban Planning that argue why and explore some of those ideas. Like urban planning and architecture, the design of any interesting software system deals with complex problems that can rarely be analysed in full and with structures that will continue to evolve in unexpected ways after they are created. My most recent reading on cities was a book The City Inside Out (Czech only, unfortunately) that explore places ..read more
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Pop-up from Hell: On the growing opacity of web programs
Tomas Petricek's blog
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3y ago
I started to learn how to program in high school at the end of the 1990s using a mix of BASIC, Turbo Pascal and HTML with JavaScript. The seed for this blog post comes from my experience with learning how to program in JavaScript, without having much guidance or organized resources. This article continues a theme that I started in my interactive Commodore 64 article, which is to look at past programming systems and see what interesting past ideas have been lost in contemporary systems. Unlike with Commodore 64, which I first used in 2018 in the Seattle Living Computers museum, my perspective o ..read more
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Software designers, not engineers: An interview from alternative universe
Tomas Petricek's blog
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3y ago
While the physicists investigate the nature of the mysterious portal that has recently appeared in North London, several human beings recently came through the portal, which appears to be a gate into an alternative universe. As we understood from the last two people coming through the portal, it seems to be a linked with a universe that is in many ways like ours, reached about the same level of social and technological development, but differs in numerous curious details. The paths through which people in this alternative universe reached similar results as our world are often subtly different ..read more
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Is deep learning a new kind of programming? Operationalistic look at programming
Tomas Petricek's blog
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4y ago
In most discussions about how to make programming better, someone eventually says something along the lines of "we'll just have to wait until deep learning solves the problem!" I think this is a naively optimistic idea, but it raises one interesting question: In what sense are programs created using deep learning a different kind of programs than those written by hand? This question recently arose in discussions that we have been having as part of the PROGRAMme project, which explores historical and philosophical perspectives on the question "What is a (computer) program?" and so this article ..read more
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Creating interactive You Draw bar chart with Compost
Tomas Petricek's blog
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4y ago
For a long time, I've been thinking about how to design a data visualization library that would make it easier to compose charts from simple components. On the one hand, there are charting libraries like Google Charts, which offer a long list of pre-defined charts. On the other hand, there are libraries like D3.js, which let you construct any data visualization, but in a very low-level way. There is also Vega, based the idea of grammar of graphics, which is somewhere in between, but requires you to specify charts in a fairly complex language including a huge number of transformations that you ..read more
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Data exploration calculus: Capturing the essence of exploratory data scripting
Tomas Petricek's blog
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5y ago
Most real-world programming languages are too complex to be studied using formal methods. For this reason, academics often work with simple theoretical languages instead. The λ-calculus is a simple formal language that is often used for talking about functional languages, the π-calculus is a model of concurrent programming and there is an entire book, A Theory of Objects modelling various object-oriented systems. Animation from Financial Times article "Why the world's recycling system stopped working". Those calculi try to capture the most interesting aspect of the programming language. This ..read more
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On architecture, urban planning and software construction
Tomas Petricek's blog
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5y ago
Despite having the term science in its name, it is not always clear what kind of discipline computer science actually is. Research on programming is sometimes like science, sometimes like mathematics, sometimes like engineering, sometimes like design and sometimes like art. It also has a long tradition of importing ideas from a wide range of other disciplines. In this article, I will look at ideas from architecture and urban planning. Architecture has already been an inspiration for design patterns, although some would say that we did quite poor job and imported a trivialized (and not very use ..read more
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What to teach as the first programming language and why
Tomas Petricek's blog
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5y ago
The number of Google search results for the phrase "choosing the first programming language" at the time of writing is 15,800. This illustrates just how debated the issue of choosing the first programming language is. In this blog post, I will not actually try to answer the question posed in the title of the post. I will not discuss what language we should teach as the first one. Instead, I will look at a more interesting question. I will investigate the arguments that are used in favour of or against particular programming languages in computer science curriculum. I am more interested in the ..read more
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Cities and programming
Tomas Petricek's blog
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6y ago
Despite having the term science in its name, it is not always clear what kind of discipline computer science actually is. Research on programming is sometimes like science, sometimes like mathematics, sometimes like engineering, sometimes like design and sometimes like art. It also has a long tradition of importing ideas from a wide range of other disciplines. In this article, I will look at ideas from architecture and urban planning. Architecture has already been an inspiration for design patterns, although some would say that we did quite poor job and imported a trivialized (and not very use ..read more
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