tag · Software
12 piecescontext-free
Code and English solve the same problem. What differs is how much the receiver knows.
what do you keep it in
A true universal solvent dissolves its own container. The last vessel is the describer.
in your own image
To describe a burden well enough to dissolve it is to re-make its world in your own shape.
do not select P01 during flight
Margaret Hamilton's first fix was a line in the manual. The manual failed twice. The code held.
the solvent that is not consumed
Water saturates and money gets spent. Software does neither, and that is the whole argument.
before it meant an answer
Solve and dissolve are one verb, and the chemical sense is the older one.
visible upon breakdown
A managed service is invisible exactly when it is working. The only fix is artifacts the client can check.
The Convergence Tax
When rivals independently reach the same abstraction, the abstraction is telling you about the territory.
worse is still better
Gabriel's 1989 essay is still the only theory of software that predicts anything.
Numbering things
There’s an old joke that the two hardest problems in computer science are cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors. Nobody talks …
what SCADA knows
Three Mile Island gave industrial automation thirty years of alarm design. Software never read it.
a problem that doesn't exist.
This was said by someone random: Tiling wms are a textbook example of a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. This was said by me: It's a feature, …