Some Rambling About Structured Text
TLA+ Workshop You know the drill. TLA+ Workshop, three days, May 24-26. Only four slots, so sign up before they're gone! New Essay Why do Interviewers Ask...
The Antipattern Scripting Language
This is a little out of the normal for this newsletter but I had an idea that I just needed to get off my brain. This is going to be a little more free-...
A Binder Full of Questions
1. A joke I once read: A certain well-known pure mathematician had a wife who, while intelligent, was not into mathematics. However, by continued practice,...
No Seriously, Hate Your Tools
TLA+ Workshop Only one slot left! 3 days, April 12-14. Register here! Why Don't Specs Compose? My friend Lars Hupel and I did a small Twitter experiment: a...
Vim is Turing-Complete
No, not VIMSCRIPT. Vim KEYSTROKES are Turing-complete.
Code is Data is YAML
This is a weirder theorycrafting post and I don't know how much I actually believe in it, but it seems like something you all'd enjoy reading. A couple weeks...
New Post, Blub Studies, and Theorycrafting
Hello everyone! First of all, new post: TLA+ Action Properties. It's about specification properties on changes to the state, not just properties on the...
J as a Desktop Calculator
Talk Tuesday I'm speaking at Berlin Function Programming Group! Noon CST tomorrow, register here. It's my standard TLA+ talk, so there won't be any major...
"Naming Things" is a Poor Name for Naming Things
It's been a while! Let's just say the past couple of weeks have not been kind to me and leave it at that. So, newsletter. I got 40% through writing about...
No, "reasoning about code" is not a scam
Late Newsletter next week Alloy workshop. Still one slot left if people are interested! No, "reasoning about code" is not a scam Last week I read “Reasoning...
Adversarial Nondeterminism
Damn, has it been two weeks since the last "real" newsletter? I feel like my brain is out shape. Anyway, I thought of a fun metaphor to explain model...
New Essay: Are We Really Engineers?
Are We Really Engineers? It's finally ready! Part one of the Crossover Project covers what inspired me to do this all, what makes engineering "engineering",...
How I got into formal methods
Alloy Workshop There's a couple slots left for the February Alloy Workshop. Feb 8th, 10 AM - 6 PM CST. Learn how to find bugs in your designs without having...
Write Code That Delivers Value to Clients
Does a person help my team deliver software to stakeholders? If they stomp their feet and demand that we spend a week reducing the program’s memory footprint...
100th Issue End-of-Year Bonanza
It's the 100th Computer Things Newsletter! I'm celebrating with a book announcement and director's commentary on all of my 2020 essays. But first, a couple...
Cross-Branch Testing
This was inspired by a few conversations I had last week. There's a certain class of problems that are hard to test: The output isn't obviously inferrable...
The Most Important Video Game Ever Made
So first question: important how? If we're just talking "impact to the game industry" it'd probably be something like Super Mario Bros or Tetris or something...
Oracle Testing
This is another experiment in producing intermediate workhorse essays, combined with a bunch of theorycrafting. Most unit tests are "example test", showing...
Safety and Liveness Properties
Hi nerds, I'm back! I didn't think about tech at all last week so don't have a whole lot on my mind this week, but let's see what I can dredge up. Workshop,...
Computer Things: Vacation Phone-In Edition
Hi all! I'm taking my first "real" vacation since I went independent two years ago. Ostensibly the plan is to spend it all juggling, cooking, and not...