Back at the turn of the century I found myself as the Editor of a Vancouver Technology Magazine called, Computer|Sense. It was just something I decided to do on the side for fun… and, as it turned out, it was incredibly fun. The highlight of my stint there was interviewing Stan “The Man” Lee, creator […]
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Functional Programming with Magik
My very first foray into software was copying a BASIC program from a blackboard and entering it into a mainframe via a DECwriter terminal way back in January 1981, a time when most people didn’t know what a computer was and even fewer knew how to write programs. I was in high school at the […]
Using Powershell with Magik
Magik is a terrific language for many tasks, but it’s at a distinct disadvantage to other languages with respect to interacting with the Operating System and Frameworks. C#, for example, has access to an entire suite of .NET Framework classes and Powershell has tons of built-in Cmdlets that do just about anything you would require. […]
Distributed Version Control Systems
In the world of Version Control Systems (VCS), two types dominate: Centralized (CVCS) and Distributed (DVCS). Common centralized VCSs include Subversion and Clearcase while the most popular distributed VCSs are Git and Mecurial (Hg). I know I shouldn’t have to say this, but since I’ve seen large companies that don’t use VCSs or use them […]
8 Useful Applications for Software Developers
When developing software, in addition to the environment-specific tools, it’s useful to have a set of general applications installed. I currently use the following: Visual Studio Code (An Editor for developing JavaScript, Smallworld and other applications. It can be transformed into a full-blown IDE via extensions. It also has basic Git functionality built-in). 7Zip (an […]
Visual Studio Code and Smallworld 5
Until Smallworld 5 was released, emacs was the standard editor with which to write Magik code. As such I’ve been using it for more than 25 years. It was okay and got the job done. But what I really wanted to use was a modern editor with features such as context-aware autocomplete, tree-like navigation, outline […]