Writing

Longer arguments that did not fit in the documentation. Mostly about the gap between telling a machine what to do and knowing that it did it.

• How we told computers what to do Seventy years of raising the level at which we instruct machines, and the one thing that got harder every single time.
• Thirty years of making two computers agree RPC, IDLs, REST and gRPC each formalised a bit more of the shape and left the order of the exchange to prose. That is where the bugs live.
• Writing code you expect to throw away If a component can be regenerated cheaply, the decisions inside it are sediment, not an asset. Four things are worth keeping instead.