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Revisiting Switch and If-then-else

In computer science, there is nothing more fundamental and intuitive than control structures. Every student learned about them in the first few weeks of any computer science program. We could not code without them, period. But they are not set in stone: we did get rid of the infamous GOTO in the 80s!


At the pre-ALGOL meeting held in 1959 Heinz Zemanek explicitly threw doubt on the necessity for GOTO statements; at the time no one paid attention to his remark, including Edsger W. Dijkstra, who later became the iconic opponent of GOTO.[3] The 1970s and 1980s saw a decline in the use of GOTO statements in favor of the "structured programming" paradigm, with goto criticized as leading to "unmaintainable spaghetti code"

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A Schema Architecture for Microservices

Message and Event payload validation has been a rather thorny problem ever since extensible data structures (XML, JSON, YAML...) started to be used at scale. In fact, very little progress has been made since the good old days of DTDs. Schema definition languages such as XML-schema, json-schema, or even the OpenAPI schema are unfamiliar to most developers and often result in a rather anemic validation set of rules, leading to a perceived low value, and therefore a lack of interest. 

There are three key problems in a schema architecture: 

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Three Approximations You Should Never Use When Coding

The path travelled by the software industry since its inception and the accomplishments in scale and scope are simply astonishing: from creating a network the size of the planet, indexing the world’s information, connecting billions of people, to driving a car or flying an aircraft, or even an application such as Excel which enables 500M people to program a computer… Turing would be amazed at what can be done with computers today and how many people use one every day, if not every minute.

In this context, innovations in software engineering have been running amok, from operating systems, runtimes, programming languages, frameworks, to methodologies, infrastructure, and operations.