69 • Myths & Mythconceptions by Mary Shaw
2023-12-28
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In the spirit of clearly communicating what you’re signing up for, this podcast episode is nearly three hours long, and among other things it contains a discussion of a paper by author Mary Shaw titled Myths & Mythconceptions which takes as an organizing principle a collection of myths that are widely believed by programmers, largely unacknowledged, which shape our views on the nature of programming as an activity and the needs of programmers as people and the sort of work that we do as a sort of work, and where by acknowledging these myths the three of us (Mary Shaw primarily, and by extension Jimmy and I, those three people, that’s it, no other people appear on this podcast) are able to more vividly grip the image of programming with our mind’s eye (or somesuch) and conceive of a different formulation for programming, and in addition to these myths this paper also incudes a number of excellent lists that I take great pleasure in reading, beyond which I should also note that the paper does a job of explaining itself and that hopefully you’ll find I’ve done a similar job, that’s the spirit, please enjoy.
No, we will not be discussing what has changed about the show, because that’s the bit!
Links
$ patreon.com/futureofcoding — I’ve recently changed it so that there’s only 1 instance of the INTERCAL tier available, so if you’re interested in those perks you’d better hop on it quick before nobody else does!
- There’s also a video, though I haven’t watched it.
- Claude Shannon would have something to say about revealing information.
- Top 10 Hits of the End of the World is an album by Prince Rama. Listen to it as loudly as you can on Bandcamp, Spotify, or Apple Music.
- Val Town is the new startup by Future of Coding community founder Steve Krouse
- Ivan recently took a job at Ink & Switch on the “Ink” research track.
- Programmer Bums, or, rather, Computer Bums
- Limmy’s Wa
- Retool
- MythBusters
- The Flop House’s Final Judgements: Good-Bad, Bad-Bad, Kinda-Like
- CRDT
- Data
- Robust-First Computing is an approach championed by the hero Dave Ackley, and I have a well-informed hunch that you’ll be hearing a lot more about it in future episodes.
- The T2 Tile Project is another Ackley joint that, perhaps, works as a wild example of what Mary Shaw means when she talks about an “execution ecosystem”.
- Devine’s talk at Strange Loop: An approach to computing and sustainability inspired from permaculture
- MUMPS (the medical thing, not to be confused with mumps the medical thing) is used by Epic (the software company, not to be confused with Epic the software company).
- The Glass Cannon podcast network.
- Lu’s SPLASH talk Cellpond: Spatial Programming without Escape
- The Turing tarpit
- Functional Programming with Bananas, Lenses, Envelopes and Barbed Wire by Erik Meijer, Maarten Fokkinga, Ross Paterson.
- Richard D. James is the same person as Richard P. (Peter) Gabriel, right?
- Similarly, see Neil Armstrong’s work on Erlang (which is popular in telephony, right?).
- The Witness is not going to appear in our show notes.
- Jack Rusher. Jack Rusher? Jack Rusher!
- TrainJam
- Gary Bernhardt’s talk Ideology
Nobody remarked on these silly links last time, so this time I’m drawing more attention to them: