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There’s a conventional piece of software development wisdom, to the effect that if writing your own programming language is an absurd and wasteful activity, because developing a programming language is a hideous time-sink, and because some existing language is almost certain to satisfy your needs perfectly well. ( There’s a good deal of truth in this advice... )

p4.el, the Emacs/Perforce Integration, provides an interface to the Perforce software version management system from the Emacs text editor. Written originally by Eric Promislow, with important contributions from Rajesh Vaidheeswarran, Peter Österlund, and many others, it’s a piece of software that I have used more or less every day for the last thirteen years. ( However, the SourceForge repository hasn’t seen any development since 2005, and it has been looking a bit ragged around the edges for a few years now. )

This is a problem that had me puzzled for a while, but has a really simple solution, so I’m writing it up here in case it might be useful to other developers who find themselves in this slightly bizarre situation.

Imagine that you are developing a web site using the Django framework. ( The underlying database has been in production for some years... )

The very first sentence of Peter F. Hamilton’s Great North Road (2012) reads:

As midnight approached, the wild neon colours of the borealis storm came shimmering through the soft snow falling gently across Newcastle upon Tyne.

How is that possible? Auroras take place high in the sky, in the thermosphere (above 80 km), but if it’s snowing then it must be cloudy in the lower troposphere (stratus clouds have a base around 2 km), so it would seem very unlikely that you could see an aurora “through snow”. Some more explanation is needed, and it’s not provided. So is this just an unlucky slip, or an example of systematic failure to think through the consequences of the settings and events in the novel? ( Let’s read on and find out. )

Inspired by David Jones’ “My Favourite Bugs”, here’s one of my own war stories.

Console video games are demanding pieces of software to write: in addition to being entertaining, they must be playable by six-year-olds and self-explanatory to adults. They must be able to gracefully handle corrupted save files. They must never run out of memory, be unresponsive to user input, or take longer than 16 ms to draw the next frame. Oh, and you typically only get one chance to get it right: when the game has to go out to manufacture on cartridge or DVD there’s no chance to fix things with a version 1.1.

( But there are compensations. )

The Hydrogen Sonata is the ninth novel in the Culture series by Iain M. Banks. It is set in the civilization of the Gzilt, which is on the verge of ‘subliming’—that is, departing the physical universe to become immortal beings of pure energy. As the big day approaches, one question still niggles: what was the origin of the Gzilt’s suspiciously well-informed ‘Book of Truth’? ( Genuine religious inspiration or hoax by ancient meddling aliens? )

Malthusianism is a topic that many science fiction writers have tackled, but the genre can not be said to have come out looking particularly good. ( The trouble is that the conventions of the genre require that a story must not raise a problem without solving it within the compass of the narrative, by some kind of heroic action. )

Hereditary aristocrats order the building of palaces; plan colonies and wars; plot, scheme, and murder each other; all while watching for signs of rebellion among the slaves who make their life of luxury and backstabbing possible. ( But unlike in the Roman Empire, on the planet Cyteen the slaves cannot even dream of freedom. )

Imagine that you have in your hands a mysterious book titled Just Walk. ( It seems to be some kind of manual of advice on how to walk, and includes useful tips like these... )