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Opaque, Transparent, Closed, Open
All other things being equal (and they never are), which type of org would you expect to flourish?
New Native Languages
The editor of Dr. Dobb’s Journal, Andrew Binstock, has put together a nice little slideshow summary of four “modern” native (native = no virtual machine running underneath the code) programming languages here: New Native Languages. As the figure below shows, these relatively new languages are D, Go, Vala, and Rust.
According to Andy, “older” native languages like C11 and C++11 “can have the feel of a past era onto which contemporary elements have been grafted“. I don’t agree with his “grafted” assertion, but I have to begrudgingly agree with him when he says:
The upshot is that to be truly expert in C++ requires far more education and far more effort than comparable mainstream OO languages (notably, Java and C#). – Andrew Binstock
Since I have much admiration for “D” creator Walter Bright and co-evolver Andrei Alexandrescu, I’ve been following the evolution of their language from afar. These two guys really know C++ inside and out; warts and all. Thus, unlike the 1995 Sun marketing proclamation that “Java is what C++ should have been“, Walter and Andrei are truly evolving D into “what C++ should be” – which is not just an OO language. Plus, they are being very gracious about it.
The IDEs Of March
I’m an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) man. I like the way IDEs (Eclipse, Visual Studio) provide an overarching dashboard overview and uniform control over the tool set needed to build software. Plus, I’m horrible at remembering commands; and as I get older, it gets worse.
How about you? Are you an IDE user or a command line person?
D4P4D
I just received two copies of William Livingston’s “Design For Prevention For Dummies” (D4P4D) gratis from the author himself. It’s actually section 7 of the “Non-Dummies” version of the book. With the addition of “For Dummies” to the title, I think it was written explicitly for me. D’oh!
The D4P is a mind bending, control theory based methodology (think feedback loops) for problem prevention in the midst of powerful, natural institutional forces that depend on problem manifestation and continued presence in order to keep the institution alive.
Mr. Livingston is an elegant, Shakespearian-type writer who’s fun to read but tough as hell to understand. I’ve enjoyed consuming his work for over 25 years but I still can’t understand or apply much of what he says – if anything!
As I slowly plod through the richly dense tome, I’ll try to write more posts that disclose the details of the D4P process. If you don’t see anything more about the D4P from me in the future, then you can assume that I’ve drowned in an ocean of confusion.
Peace And Despair
Existential despair is the painful discrepancy between what is and what should be – Paul Watzlawick
Your despair can be my peace and vice versa. On the other hand, my despair can be your despair and my peace can be your peace.
Relentless Assault
Microsoft’s Herb Sutter is a whirling dervish. Since the ISO approval of the C++11 standard last fall, he’s been on a crusade to promote C++ via several comparative assaults on Java and Microsoft’s own C#.
Herb’s latest blitzkrieg occurred at the lang.next 2012 conference (video link, slides link). In this slide, Herb summarizes some of the C++11 features that close the productivity and safety gap relative to C# and Java.
In this next slide, Herb contrasts C++11’s adherence to its more open “trust the programmer” philosophy against the more closed “we know what’s good for you” C#/Java philosophy.
Unless the large movement of business applications to the cloud is the latest fad du jour, the following two slides show that the largest software development and maintenance costs will shift from labor to compute efficiency. Thus, it doesn’t matter how programmer friendly your language is and how low the salaries you pay are, you might find that your costs are going up because of power drain in massive data centers and time spent frantically optimizing VM-based code that’s relatively slower and bigger.
In closing, Herb, the nice guy that he is, backs off a bit with this “the right tool for the right job” slide:
Is Herb stretching the truth and exaggerating the improvements offered up by C++11? The fact that I wrote this post obviously means that I don’t. What about you, dear reader? What say you?
Spiritual Google
Wow! I can’t believe I stumbled upon this. What’s “this“, you ask? It’s a video of a talk given by Eckhart Tolle at Google. Yes, Google.
I know that religion is a deeply personal issue, but if you’ve never seen Eckhart Tolle in action, please indulge BD00 by at least watching a few minutes of the video with an open mind. Lemme know if it tickles something inside of you. If you get a “meh” feeling, then that’s OK too. Do you think he’s the real deal or just another Swaggart/Bakker clone?
Quality Living
It’s one thing to have a high falutin’ written quality policy (and it’s standard fare for all commercial enterprises to have one enshrined in magnets, buttons, key chains, and strategically placed posters), but it’s another thing to live it. If DICsters joke about the “quality” policy frequently and managers never utter the word “quality” during the real-time execution of projects, then neither side is living it, no?
How could you know whether your company is living up to your quality policy? Do your customers and users frequently tell you – unsolicited? Do your earned value metrics tell you? Are your people unabashedly and vocally proud of what they build?
Thank god that at most companies, the management group is a true champion of quality and those “few” trench dwellers who cynically joke about it are simply deemed as a handful of miserable and disgruntled blokes who must be marginalized or ex-communicated.
Starting Point
Unless you’re an extremely lucky programmer or you work in academia, you’ll spend most of your career maintaining pre-existing, revenue generating software for your company. If your company has multiple products and you don’t choose to stay with one for your whole career, then you’ll also be hopping from one product to another (which is a good thing for broadening your perspective and experience base – so do it).
For your viewing pleasure, I’ve sketched out the structure and provided some code-level metrics on the software-intensive product that I recently started working on. Of course, certain portions of the graphic have been redacted for what I hope are obvious reasons.
How about you? What does your latest project look like?
The Old Is New Again
Because Moore’s law has seemingly run its course, vertical, single processor core speed scaling has given way to horizontal multicore scaling. The evidence of this shift is the fact that just about every mobile device and server and desktop and laptop is shipping with more than one processor core these days. Thus, the acquisition of concurrent and distributed design and programming skills is becoming more and more important as time tics forward. Can what Erlang’s Joe Armstrong coined as the “Concurrent Oriented Programming” style be usurping the well known and widely practiced object-oriented programming style as we speak?
Because of their focus on stateless, pure functions (as opposed to stateful objects), it seems to me that functional programming languages (e.g. Erlang, Haskell, Scala, F#) are a more natural fit to concurrent, distributed, software-intensive systems development than object-oriented languages like Java and C++; even though both these languages provide basic support for concurrent programming in the form of threads.
Likewise, even though I’m a big UML fan, I think that “old and obsolete” structured design modeling tools like Data and Control Flow Diagrams (DFD, CFD) may be better suited to the design of concurrent software. Even better, I think a mixture of the UML and DFD/CFD artifacts may be the best way (as Grady Booch says) to “visualize and reason” about necessarily big software designs prior to coding up and testing the beasts.
So, what do you think? Should the old become new again? Should the venerable DFD be resurrected and included in the UML portfolio of behavior diagrams?
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