ross spencer :: exponentialdecay.digipres :: blog
Digital preservation analyst, researcher, and software developer
Just released on the No Time to Wait (NTTW) YouTube channel is my presentation from NTTW8 in Karlsruhe, Germany. (Slides also available here).
The presentation follows up on my proposal for iPRES 2024 and allowed me to present parts of what was, in the end, a pretty significant paper (in terms of word count).
Some of my reflections on the presentation are below.
A primitive in software development can be described as:
a fundamental data type or code that can be used to build more complex software programs or interfaces.
– via https://www.capterra.com/glossary/primitive/ (also Wiki: language primitives)
Like bricks and mortar in the building industry, or oil and acrylic for a painter, a primitive helps a software developer to create increasingly more complex software, from your shell scripts, to entire digital preservation systems.
Primitives also help us to create file formats, as we’ve seen with the Eyeglass example I have presented previously, the file format is at its most fundamental level a representation of a data structure as a binary stream, that can be read out of the data structure onto disk, and likewise from disk to a data structure from code.
For the file format developer we have at our disposal all of the primitives that the software developer has, and like them, we also have “file formats” (as we tend to understand them in digital preservation terms) that serve as our primitives as well.