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Mocks Aren't Stubs (2007)
Explaining the difference between Mock Objects and Stubs (together with other forms of Test Double). Also the difference between classical and mockist styles of unit testing.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 2,232 posts.
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A Whole New World
This talk announces the most ambitious software project I've ever undertaken, then considers why its existence is so surprising (and in some cases frustrating) to people.
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Software 2.0 (2017)
I sometimes see people refer to neural networks as just “another tool in your machine learning toolbox”. They have some pros and cons, they…
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Standard Markdown Is Now Common Markdown
Let me open with an apology to John Gruber for my previous blog post. We’ve been working on the Standard Markdown project for about two years now. We invited John Gruber, the original creator of Markdown, to join the project via email in November 2012, but never heard back.
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On the cruelty of really teaching computing science (1988)
The second part of this talk pursues some of the scientific and educational consequences of the assumption that computers represent a radical novelty. In order to give this assumption clear contents, we have to be much more precise as to what we mean in this context by the adjective "radical". We shall do so in the…
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A Note About Git Commit Messages
I want to take a moment to elaborate on what makes a well formed commit message. I think the best practices for commit message formatting is one of the little details that makes Git great. Understandably, some of the first commits to rails.git have messages of the really-long-line variety, and I want to expand on why…
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JSLinux - Technical Notes
In 2011 I wrote the initial version of JSLinux, the first PC/x86 emulator in Javascript running Linux. I reused parts of another of my emulators ( QEMU ) for the x86 helpers and the devices.
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Correctness and composability bugs in the Julia ecosystem
For many years I used the Julia programming language for transforming, cleaning, analyzing, and visualizing data, doing statistics, and performing simulations.
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Dijkstra On the foolishness of "natural language programming"
Since the early days of automatic computing we have had people that have felt it as a shortcoming that programming required the care and accuracy that is characteristic for the use of any formal symbolism. They blamed the mechanical slave for its strict obedience with which it carried out its given instructions, even…
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The Humble Programmer (1972)
As a result of a long sequence of coincidences I entered the programming profession officially on the first spring morning of 1952 and as far as I have been able to trace, I was the first Dutchman to do so in my country. In retrospect the most amazing thing was the slowness with which, at least in my part of the…
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Programming Bottom-Up (1993)
(This essay is from the introduction to On Lisp .) It's a long-standing principle of programming style that the functional elements of a program should not be too large. If some component of a program grows beyond the stage where it's readily comprehensible, it becomes a mass of complexity which conceals errors as…
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QArt – Pictures in QR code with no inherent errors
QR codes are 2-dimensional bar codes that encode arbitrary text strings. A common use of QR codes is to encode URLs so that people can scan a QR code (for example, on an advertising poster, building roof , volleyball bikini , belt buckle , or airplane banner ) to load a web site on a cell phone instead of having to…
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The qmail security guarantee
Of course, ``security hole in qmail'' does not include problems outside of qmail: for example, NFS security problems, TCP/IP security problems, DNS security problems, bugs in scripts run from .forward files, and operating system bugs generally. It's silly to blame a problem on qmail if the system was already…
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The Tao Of Programming
Last substantive modification 1996-04-10 or earlier; Kragen link updated 2016-11-30
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John Carmack on inlined code (2014)
(Here begins a comment written by John Carmack in 2014, about an email he sent to a programmers’ mailing list in 2007.)
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Git for Computer Scientists (2010)
Quick introduction to git internals for people who are not scared by words like Directed Acyclic Graph .
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Use the Unofficial Bash Strict Mode (Unless You Love Debugging)
Let's start with the punchline. Your bash scripts will be more robust, reliable and maintainable if you start them like this:
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Understanding Clojure's Persistent Vectors, pt. 1 (2013)
Ever wondered how Clojure's persistent vector actually works? This is part 1 of a blog series which aims to explain them.
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The story of Mel (1983)
A recent article devoted to the *macho* side of programming made the bald and unvarnished statement:
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Dynamic languages are static languages
While reviewing some of the comments on my post about parallelism and concurrency, I noticed that the great fallacy about dynamic and static languages continues to hold people in its thrall. So, i…
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Why mobile web apps are slow
I’ve had an unusual number of interesting conversations spin out of my previous article documenting that mobile web apps are slow. This has sparked some discussion, both online and IRL. But…
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Erase your darlings: immutable infrastructure for mutable systems
Over time, a system collects state on its root partition. This state lives in assorted directories like /etc and /var , and represents every under-documented or out-of-order step in bringing up the services.
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Algebraic Effects for the Rest of Us
They’re not burritos.
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The Error Model in Midori
Joe Duffy's Blog | Adventures in the high-tech underbelly