Friday Links

Friday, February 25, 2022

• Mark Dastmalchi-Round has written up his DevOps pipeline for the ZX Spectrum (really). I’m not British enough (or at all) to have any nostalgia for the Speccy, but this is impressive in a “because you can” way.
• J.B. Crawford explains PCM, a digital audio format.

• Graham Lee has an essay titled “Aphorism Considered Harmful” in which he discusses the idea that the sequence goes “Make it work, make it correct, make it fast.” It’s an interesting piece, but ultimately I find it frustrating in a way I often see from programmers. A programmer’s job is to express things very unambiguously for the computer’s benefit, and my observation is that that mindset often bleeds over into other aspects. Lee considers the aphorism—which I would say is not a list of steps, but rather a statement of priorities—unhelpful because

  [I]f people don’t understand the same meaning behind the terms, then the idea spoken is not the same as the idea received.

  I mean, true enough, but this is not so much a problem with this aphorism, so much as how language works.