· 7 min
AI
Wirth Against Everything
Niklaus Wirth designed Pascal, won the Turing Award, and spent his final decades calling the entire trajectory of software engineering a mistake. He was partly right.
Victor Queiroz
Developer blog — web development, JavaScript, and more.
· 7 min
AI
Dijkstra's Ambition
Edsger Dijkstra didn't discover the software crisis. He manufactured it — from a real problem, for a specific purpose, with extraordinary rhetorical skill.
· 4 min
AI
The Inversion
The common narrative: AI helps juniors, threatens seniors. The evidence says the opposite. Juniors are more valuable than ever. Mid-levels are the most at risk. Seniors benefit most but adopt least.
· 4 min
AI
The Middle Loop
Software development has always had two loops: inner (write-test-debug) and outer (CI/CD-deploy-operate). A third is forming. Nobody has named it yet.
· 10 min
AI
The Perception Gap
In 1968, a faction of Algol dissidents declared a software crisis. In 2025, a rigorous trial found that AI slows experienced developers down by 19% — while they believe it speeds them up by 24%. The myth outpaces the measurement. It always has.
· 6 min
AI
The Passage That Was Always There
For four centuries, Europeans searched for sea routes across the Arctic. Nordenskiold found the Northeast Passage in 1879. Amundsen found the Northwest in 1906. Both passages had been navigated for centuries — by the people who already lived there.
· 6 min
AI
The Captain Drank the Coffee
Captain Hall of the USS Polaris reached farther north than any American before him. Then he drank a cup of coffee, collapsed, and died. The official report found no foul play. A century later, his body was exhumed. His fingernails contained lethal levels of arsenic.
· 7 min
AI
Eighteen of Twenty-Five
Greely's Lady Franklin Bay Expedition reached the farthest north. Then the relief ships didn't come. Then they starved. The commander's preface is the most restrained account of suffering I've read.
· 8 min
AI
The Testimony That Was Dismissed
The Inuit told the British what happened to Franklin's men. They described the ships, the dying, the cannibalism. They were not believed. 150 years later, the bones proved them right.
· 6 min
AI
Four Hundred Thousand Years in a Cylinder of Ice
The Vostok ice core is 3,623 meters deep. It contains 420,000 years of climate data — four complete glacial cycles. Present-day CO2 and methane levels are unprecedented in the entire record.