Kopec Explains Software

Go, a Google-backed programming language, is by some measures one of the ten most popular programming languages in the world. Although it's a general purpose language, it's also an opinionated one. The team of veteran language designers, highly influenced by C and disenchanted with C++, felt it was important to keep things simple. Since its launch in 2009, the language has not changed much. Its si...

Functional programming languages fit within a declarative paradigm and often have several key characteristics in common: immutable data types, pure functions, a distaste for global state, a preference for recursion over loops, first-class functions, and the liberal use of higher-order functions. We explain what these characteristics mean, why functional programming has been increasingly popular, a...

Last month marked the 40th anniversary of the Apple Lisa. The Lisa was an important evolutionary link in the history of the personal computer between the innovations at Xerox's PARC laboratory where the graphical user interface (GUI) was first conceived, and the modern GUIs that we are familiar with today. Released in 1983, the Lisa predated the Macintosh by a year and Windows by almost three year...

We're out sick this week, so we remastered our first ever episode. It's a little more general in scope than what we typically cover on the podcast, but we think it still holds up. We'll see you in two weeks! We define software. What is software? How is it different than hardware? What is the language of software? What are the different kinds of software? Who makes software? How do they make it? Fo...

Mastodon is a social network currently attracting significant buzz in the tech world. A lot of its new users are part of an exodus from Twitter. But how does Mastodon differ from Twitter? It's open source, run by a non-profit, and uses a federated model. We explain why this matters and some of its downsides in this episode. Show Notes Mastodon Mastodon on Wikipedia Most popular social networks wor...

Different programming languages employ different memory management techniques. The most common are manual memory management, tracing garbage collectors, and reference counting. For the programmer, each of these techniques requires different levels of bookkeeping and causes a different trade-off between safety and performance. In this episode, we explain each of these memory management techniques a...

Mozilla is the entity that makes the Firefox web browser. It has an interesting corporate structure. The non-profit Mozilla Foundation has a for-profit subsidiary that does Firefox development. Much of Mozilla's revenue comes from an agreement with Google to be the default search engine within Firefox. In this episode we explore this arrangement and the scale of Google's payment with regards to th...

In the late 1990s, the open source software movement split from the free software movement. A rebranding, the open source movement has a less philosophical, or some may say moral, focus than the free software movement. Despite this, 99.9% of open source software is also free software according to their respective official definitions. In this episode we discuss the differences between the free sof...

Cross-platform mobile frameworks enable developers to write an app once and recompile it for both iOS and Android. This can reduce development costs, but there are some downsides. In this episode we discuss the differences between major cross-platform mobile frameworks and weigh their pros and cons. Show Notes Episode 104: Web Apps vs. Native Apps Episode 99: Android App Development Episode 9: Wha...

On January 19, 2038, certain non-updated legacy systems that use Unix time will roll their dates around to December 13, 1901. In Unix, time is recorded as the number of seconds since January 1, 1970. Because a signed 32-bit integer is used to record this value on many legacy systems, they will run out of seconds in 2038 (a signed 32-bit integer can record numbers up to 2,147,483,647, and that's th...

When planning the development of a new app, one of the most basic questions to answer is whether to develop it as a Web app or as a native app. In this episode we delineate some of the pros and cons of each approach, including cost, accessibility, performance, capabilities, and more. We also discuss some alternatives like hybrid apps and cross-platform frameworks. Show Notes Episode 4: iOS vs. And...

Expert systems are a sub-discipline within artificial intelligence concerned with creating problem solving programs based on machine-encoded human domain expertise. An expert system typically consists of a knowledge base, consisting of human-defined rules, and an inference engine that can run a problem through the rules. Expert systems were a very popular and successful area of AI research in the...

The PDF (Portable Document Format) file format has become ubiquitous in the computing world. PDF is a super format that can embed vector graphics, advanced typography, bitmap graphics, multiple compression technologies, fonts, encryption, interactive elements, and more. It is primarily used for creating documents that display exactly as they looked at creation on any machine. They are great for pr...

It is important to make software that is usable by all people, and that includes users with physical or mental challenges. Accessibility is about removing barriers, so that software can be used by everyone. In this episode we give a brief overview of accessibility in software. We emphasize the role that common sense good design plays, and explain how accessibility-aware developers can tap into ope...

When it was released, the World Wide Web revolutionized communications and commerce. It was created by Tim Berners-Lee, who outlined its key technical achievements, philosophy, and insights in his 2000 book Weaving the Web . In this episode, we go over three of the key innovations explained in the book: networked hypertext, the URI, and decentralization. We also discuss one innovation that did not...

Android is the most popular operating system in the world, but developing apps for it can feel intimidating. In this episode we breakdown the Android development ecosystem—including the programming languages, frameworks, testing environments, and more. We approach the episode from the perspective of someone new to learning Android app development, but we also compare and contrast Android developme...

It has long been debated whether Apple is more of a hardware company or more of a software company. In its quarterly reports it does not delineate between the two. Instead, it breaks its revenue into four big product categories and services. It cannot be pigeon-holed—it is a fusion of hardware, software, and services. Growth in services, in particular, has been a major focus of the company for the...

An Application Programming Interface (API) is a specification for how a piece of software provides functionality to other pieces of software. APIs can broadly be categorized into two categories: local and remote. Local APIs are provided by libraries from the operating system vendor or third parties. Remote APIs are specifications for how software on one computer can provide functionality to softwa...

A BIOS (Basic Input/Output System) is a piece of firmware on a PC that sits between the hardware and the operating system. It takes care of some essential functions like hardware startup tests, power management, boot device order, and control of microprocessor support chips. The original firmware on IBM PCs and PC compatibles was called the "BIOS", but most PCs manufactured in the last decade use...

The world of data stores has become complex and fragmented. Companies find their data spread across a variety of sources with no obvious way to integrate it. Estuary is a startup that is taming that complexity by making it easier to create real-time data pipelines. In this episode we speak with Johnny Graettinger, the co-founder of Estuary, about data fragmentation, DataOps, data pipelines, and th...

There is a constant battle between software publishers and pirates who find ways to redistribute proprietary software in violation of its license. In this episode we explain how copyright law protects proprietary software, the mechanisms publishers employ to reduce piracy including forms of DRM, and the means pirates use to distribute software. We also have a philosophical discussion about whether...

Your phone includes multiple technologies for tracking your location. Your location can be triangulated via signals to cell towers, precisely pinpointed using its GPS chip and a connection to a satellite, and approximated using WiFi signals and a big database of WiFi base station locations. In addition, an Indoor Positioning System like iBeacon can be used to track your phone inside a building. In...

By several measures, including a 2021 survey by IEEE, Python is the most popular programming language in the world. But why? What's special about it? In this episode we'll go over Python's history, key technical aspects of the language, and the niches within software development that it dominates. We also discuss some problems in the Python world. Show Notes Episode 11: What is a Programming Langu...

Today we know PayPal as a financial powerhouse. But when it was a young company, it had to innovate to survive. PayPal was the result of the merger of two startups—Confinity and X.com . Confinity was trying to be a digital payments solution for Palm Pilots, while X.com was an early online bank. PayPal first found success as a conduit for eBay payments. But perhaps PayPal's greatest innovations wer...

Binary search is an algorithm for finding an item in a sorted data set. It requires that all of the items in the data set be of the same data type and comparable to one another. In other words, the data type needs to have a defined "order." Binary search is orders of magnitude more efficient than its chief alternative, linear search, which is just an in-order search of every item in a data set. Bi...