Algorithm Monocultures
A while back I got really into "corporate blogs". Why are they so soulless? Why do they all sound the same? I asked a friend had managed one of these blogs,...
I ****ing hate Science
I'm a big advocate of Empirical Software Engineering. I wrote a talk on it. I wrote a 6000-word post covering one controversy. I spend a lot of time reading...
Program Spaces and Interesting Counterexamples
Okay so let's say I have a function f and ask you to figure out what it is. Input's a list of integers, output is one integer. You gotta figure it out by...
10 Misconceptions about Formal Methods
Whole lotta talk about formal methods last week. Moshe Vardi dropped an ACM piece, Jean Yang wrote an essay, and Nicole Tietz-Sokolskaya frontpaged Hacker...
What is a "Specification"?
What is a specification? The most popular testing library in Ruby is called RSpec, and uses the terminology of Behavior-Driven Development, where tests are...
Physical vs Logical Time
There's nothing I'm rarin' to share so I figured I'd talk about a concept in verification I see a lot but haven't seen explicitly discussed anywhere. I don't...
Comment the Why *and* the What
People say "comment the why, not the what", the idea being that the code should be self-documenting and the comments should only be a last resort for...
Designing Software with Predicate Logic
One reason I like teaching is it helps me understand things better. This came up in a couple different ways while working on the new book, and I'm too...
Users are Nondeterministic Agents of Chaos
New Post: Clever vs Insightful Code I shared an early version with the newsletter some time back, and now the final version is done! This one is less...
Predicate Logic For Programmers
May is finally, finally over. This was one of the roughest months both jobwise and lifewise in recent memory. But now all my deadlines are over, I'm fully...
Scaffolding TLA+
I'm in the process of updating my TLA+ workshop for my class next week.1 Every time I run it I get new ideas on what to improve. After April's class, one of...
New Essay, some thoughts on method vs process
No Newsletter Next Week I hate to do this twice in three weeks, but I have a TLA+ workshop next Monday. A Brief Introduction to Esolangs Two pieces of...
Esolangs!
No Newsletter next week I have some real life stuff going on and also a secret project deadline. I'd still like to make time for the newsletter, but it's...
Can Formal Methods Succeed where UML Failed?
Last Tuesday's piece Why UML "Really" Died went viral. I'm glad that people enjoyed it, and I also was happy to use all that fallow research, but something's...
Why UML "Really" Died
There's this post going around the internet called Has UML died without anyone noticing?, In the piece, Ernesto Garbarino says that UML was killed by...
The Jame of Life
I have a love-hate relationship with APLs. On one hand, they're unbelievably powerful in what they can do. On the other hand, they're absolutely awful in...
Grind Smarter, not Harder
New Essay: Why Specifications Don't Compose Read it here! Didn't sneak peek it to the newsletter because I used a lot of Hugo preprocessing, so this is the...
Reject Simplicity, Embrace Complexity
"Keep it simple!" "Just write simple code!" "Great devs come up with simple solutions!" I get it. Simple code is better than complex code. It's an important...
Function Sets and Specification
May TLA+ Workshop Still three slots left! May 24-26. Learn how to find bugs that would slip right past types, test, and code review. No Newsletter Next Week...
Why Property Testing Finds Bugs Unit Testing Does Not
I intended this newsletter to be my thoughts without editing, and I have a new thought, so here goes. I want to respond to this discussion: But Kids These...