Adventures in software engineering

I had a program that produced boolean expressions with thousands of variables and operations, pages upon pages of stuff like "… ⋁ (¬A473 ⋀ B732) ⋁ (A232 ⋀ ¬C987) ⋁ …", certainly not human-readable.

The generator started off being pretty buggy. How was I to find a bug in such a generator?

Tangent: Robert Freidson told me that I was fucked in the head.

In the 1980s I wrote a database management system. The system was too large to run in the 64k of RAM available on our minicomputer, so I ended up implementing a virtual memory mechanism.

Tangent: What does this have to do with the FBI and KGB?

In middle of 1980s I wrote a large DBMS. The problem with my DBMS was that it crashed all the time and I just couldn’t figure out the cause of the crash.

Tangent: why are there so many curse words in the English computer science lingo?

If you define an interface, say String, you should be able to provide an implementation of method like “translateToEnglish” that would be automatically adopted by all classes implementing the String interface.

This was a highly abstract platform for building all kinds of visual modeling systems with heterogenous models.

At the end of the article, I declare that this was the highest achievement of my career and then dispute that declaration.

This article outlines the architecture of a template based code generator. The templates themselves were written in a specialized programming language.

Configuration instead of code. This was the approach we took to creating an extensive web application, Home Counselor Online.

Mistakes were made: the web app was using HttpSessions and EJBs