Big Ice

Live Science, via Yahoo News...

If B-15A gets stuck, as it has before, researchers fear it could block sea ice behind it, thwarting animals that need to move from shore to the open sea.

B-15A is the largest chunk left of a bigger iceberg, known as B-15, that broke off the Ross Ice Shelf in March 2000. That initial frozen hunk was about the size of Jamaica. After B-15 broke apart, the chunk named B-15A drifted into McMurdo Sound, where it blocked ocean currents and caused other sea ice to build up, threatening wildlife.

Scientists predicted an imminent collision back in January this year. Instead, the iceberg ran aground and stalled out. Then it broke free in March. On the move again, it collided with the Drygalski ice tongue in April, forcing the redraw of Antarctica maps.

Missing More Boats?

Chris Anderson has been exploring Python and states...

I've really come to the conclusion that Microsoft is missing the boat around dynamic languages and scripting in general.

Agreed. And yet...

I think that scripting and many dynamic languages are in the same camp. They are great for small applications and writing glue code. Look at Google Maps, the real processing is on the server...

Regardless of the limitations, our singular focus on strongly typed compiled languages has blinded us to the amazing productivity and approachability of dynamic scripting langauges like Python and Ruby.

Python and Ruby are fine languages. Miles ahead of most others. They work well in many situations.

Remember their most common implementations are relatively simple. Don't use them as the benchmark of where the performance can really go, and has been for some time, e.g. in Smalltalk, Common Lisp, and Scheme where more attention has been paid to efficient implementations.

Microsoft will be missing a huge opportunity if they settle for current Python and Ruby performance as their "scripting" language par. The first step toward this new consciousness would be to stop using the term "scripting". Call them "dynamic" or "agile" or something that does not connote just slow "glue".

Check out JP Morgan's KAPITAL system in Smalltalk. This is the engine, not the glue. Don't miss the boat.

Decidedly Unwiki-like

Jotspot is about as cool as it gets. But when you are dealing with stuff like this can it fairly be called a wiki?

<wiki:search forAll="true" filter="it/ActualTimeForm/iteration=args/iteration" />
<wiki:var var="totalSpent" value="${0}" />
<wiki:var var="totalRemaining" value="${0}" />
<wiki:loop>
  <wiki:var key="ms" value="${it/ActualTimeForm/timeSpent/milliseconds}" />
  <wiki:var key="totalSpent" value="${totalSpent + ms}" />
  <wiki:var key="ms" value="${it/ActualTimeForm/timeRemaining/milliseconds}" />
  <wiki:var key="totalRemaining" value="${totalRemaining + ms}" />
</wiki:loop>
<wiki:var key="percent" value="${round(totalSpent div (totalSpent + totalRemaining) * 100)}%" />
@chart
<div style="width:100%; border: 1px solid black; padding:0px; background-color:red">
  <div style="background: green; width: ${percent}; margin: 0px;text-align: center; color: #ddd">
  ${percent}
  </div>
</div>
@chart

Accounting for the Long Tail

The Accounts framework and other Adaptive Object Models provide more support for long-tail notions in software...

A system with an Adaptive Object-Model has an explicit object model that it interprets at run-time. If you change the object model, the system changes its behavior. For example, a lot of workflow systems have an Adaptive Object-Model. Objects have states and respond to events by changing state. The Adaptive Object-Model defines the objects, their states, the events, and the conditions under which an object changes state. Suitably privileged people can change this object model "without programming". Or are they programming after all? Business rules can be stored in an Adaptive Object-Model that makes it easy to evolve the way a company does their business.

And then [micro-]workflow. (But the site was having trouble today)

Experiments with OVAL

Tom Malone, et al. of MIT Sloan School addressed the long-tail of software some time ago (throughout the 1980's and then some). Their work resulted in more than a handful of useful papers and several generations of useful software written in a few dialects of Lisp (ultimately Macintosh Common Lisp). I wonder what happened to the software.

Demonstrating the range of software that could be addressed with little effort, one of the most ignored reports of all time in software has to be "Experiments with OVAL"...

This paper describes a series of tests of the generality of a "radically tailorable" tool for cooperative work. Users of this system can create applications by combining and modifying four kinds of building blocks: objects, views, agents, and links. We found that user-level tailoring of these primitives can provide most of the functionality found in well-known cooperative work systems such as gIBIS, Coordinator, Lotus Notes, and Information Lens. These primitives, therefore, appear to provide an elementary "tailoring language" out of which a wide variety of integrated information management and collaboration applications can be constructed by end users.

"Objects" in OVAL are essentially just like "objects" in JSON, i.e. they are name/value pairs. The main difference is there is a templating mechanism and one can inherit from another. There are no "methods" associated with objects, but rule-based actions are based on "duck typing", in this case the names and values an object has.

Content and Presentation

Sean McGrath raises the fuzzy boundary between content and presentation. My thoughts on the matter...

The concern about content vs. presentation is based in code maintenance. The model-view-controller design allows the model and the view to change independently (controller has remained a bit of a bear).

This separation is less of a concern on the web, although adapting content to multiple presentations is more than desirable. For example, "micro-formats" that embed content within HTML (which is perhaps 'semi-presentational'?) such that CSS can style based on more content-specific content than HTML itself, and such that automated systems can ignore the presentation and drive actions based on the content.

Supposedly the automated systems should care less if the presentation aspects of the format changes and vice versa. Agile data formats and processors should have less to do with a content/presentation dichotomy, and have more to do with semi-structured data, i.e. whether or not the document has enough information of the expected kind to do useful work.

Not Elegant?

Dynamic ("scripting" in this article) languages continue to gain more attention. Play along at home. Spot the misconceptions...

"Scripting (languages are) just getting more popular and powerful simply because they're easy to use," said Tim Huckaby, CEO of consulting firm and Microsoft partner InterKnowlogy. "It's all about time to market and money, not about how elegant it is underneath."

Another XP Code Sprint

Another Portland code sprint will be held at Free Geek on May 25-26 from 6:30pm each evening. Free Geek has some of their own compute power available if you don't want to mess with your own.

Jeff Freyley, one of the organizers, writes...

This will be a language neutral Sprint, so remember: language wars can only be settled by tree-climbing contests at midnight, not by words.

Jython Integers

Moving Python and other dynamic languages to the popular rigid virtual machines should preserve Python behavior while providing access to the host language and platform capabilities.

When I used Jython a couple years ago I guess I did not stress this behavior. And so today I am a bit surprised to see the following in Jython 2.1...

>>> java.lang.Integer.MAX_VALUE
2147483647
>>> n = java.lang.Integer.MAX_VALUE
>>> n
2147483647
>>> n.__class__

>>> n + 1
Traceback (innermost last):
  File "", line 1, in ?
OverflowError: integer addition: 2147483647 + 1
>>>

Comments

It is a correct behavior. Try evaluating "sys.maxint + 1" on CPython 2.1...

If you do "sys.maxint + 1L", (note "L") it works both on CPython 2.1 and Jython 2.1.

End Comments

OK. So the goal becomes getting Jython up to 2.4 or at least the version past CPython 2.1 where both sys.maxint + 1L and sys.maxint + 1 do the (same) right thing.

Thanks

The Age of the Dynamic

Update: It looks like IronPython could become a preferred approach to programming Avalon.

I define a new type in python, with *no properties*. I then dynamically assign anything to the objects with the name "name" and "value"... everything else is Avalon + Python goodness... oh yeah!

What's that buzz I hear?

End Update

Dynamic languages continue their dance with the Big Boyz.

All in due time. All in due time.

Information Overlord?

Philip Greenspun on Longhorn and file systems in general...

The average household user of a personal computer doesn't need anything with many more features than the Palm OS or Microsoft Outlook and probably has far fewer megabytes of documents than he or she has of archived email.

Information overlord?

Empirical Evidence And Analytical Reasoning

Bob Martin writes about the interplay of test-driven development and analytical reasoning.

Techniques such as TDD are valuable empirical techniques that can create the dots; but you need reasoned analysis to connect those dots. A suite of tests shows you that a program behaves as expected for discrete situations. Analytical reasoning tells you how you can generalize those situations.

AJAX

On the Ajaxian blog...

Google is the science fair of Ajax.

Live Action

James Roberston...

The nice thing is that I could experiment on live data in a running application. Here's a screenshot of the resulting inspector...

Navigation in Avalon

Ed Kaim writes about Avalon...

If you look at how the Web works, it's a "Web" because of the way you can hop from one site to another and criss-cross your way from anywhere to anywhere else. The integration isn't complex--it's basically HREFs, POSTs, and GETs. What these enable, however, is a way to write large systems to address business needs in such a way that they are really a set of smaller building block applications that can be glued together (often dynamically).

In contrast, Windows client programming today (Win32, .NET, J2SE, whatever) has a programming model that is much less conducive to integration... While there are tons of sexy features coming in Avalon, my money is on navigation as the single most important feature.

Greasemonkey and the Treaty of Orlando

Babak Nivi suggests...

Greasemonkey is to websites what inheritance is to objects in object-oriented programming.

But of course this is not correct. 8^)

As per Henry Liberman, this is clearly a delegation-based approach using web sites as prototypes.

(via Sam Ruby)

Impeachment Time

Greg Palast, former columnist for Britain's Guardian papers, author of the New York Times bestseller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, writes...

Now sharp readers may note they didn't see this memo, in fact, printed in the New York Times. It wasn't. Rather, it was splashed across the front pages of the Times of LONDON on Monday.

But in the US, barely a word. The New York Times covers this hard evidence of Bush's fabrication of a casus belli as some "British" elections story. Apparently, our President's fraud isn't "news fit to print."

The Republicans impeached Bill Clinton over his cigar and Monica's affections. And the US media could print nothing else.

Now, we have the stone, cold evidence of bending intelligence to sell us on death by the thousands, and neither a Republican Congress nor what is laughably called US journalism thought it worth a second look.

My friend Daniel Ellsberg once said that what's good about the American people is that you have to lie to them. What's bad about Americans is that it's so easy to do.

Trouble Ahead

...or below, depending on the metaphor.

Warren Buffett and Charles Munger, via Philip Greenspun...

Some people seem to think there's no trouble... just because it hasn't happened yet. If you jump out the window at the 42nd floor and you're still doing fine as you pass the 27th floor, that doesn't mean you don't have a serious problem.

SOA vs. the Long Tail

Phil Windley on SOA.

Knowing about the financials process in some detail, I can attest that spreadsheets are involved in all aspects from forecasting to closing the books. Even when enterprise software is applied, there is a good bit of export to Excel, do the work, import to the enterprise systems.

Now, tie this in with recent efforts like Jotspot, Smallthought, and 37Signals, et al. where they are trying to address that "long tail" of software in a better way than Excel, Access, etc. (Note: in some cases incorporating Excel. Side note: all three of these efforts have embraced dynamic languages.)

This is where the big enterprise companies like SAP, Peoplesoft, etc. could focus some attention. Those of us working with these enterprise systems spend a lot of time at the interfaces of those systems with the rest of the enterprise. They do not support the "long tail" that exists within the enterprise, and moving to J2EE, Indigo, SOA, "portals", etc. is not addressing the *real* problem either.

We don't need a high-tech SOA as much as we need better "long tail" support. SOA is more for geeks than for enterprises. The enterprise vendor that figures out how to make SOA just a bunch of uninteresting plumbing underneath really good "long tail" support could end up a *big* winner.

Announcing json-py

Updates from the comments:

Ian Bicking suggests doctest would be more appropriate than unittest. I would have to agree, if I were enough of a Python programmer to know to use doctest. Each unit test is a couple of lines long, so I should move them to doctests with little trouble.

Eric Thompson wonders about support for tuples. The JSON array syntax looks like Python's list syntax, so I chose read to produce lists. JSON only has "objects" (dictionaries) and "arrays" (could be lists or tuples) for data structures. The write function could accept either lists or tuples and produce JSON arrays. Currently only lists are implemented. I'm open to suggestions.

End Update

I wrote a JSON reader and writer in Python over the last few days. Today sourceforge approved and created the project, and the files are ready for download.

It's "pure" Python 2.4 and has no other dependencies. Most of JSON is implemented, which is not much, coming in at about 200 LOC. The missing piece is the \uXXXX notation for hex Unicode characters. There's probably some missing functionality in the writer, e.g. writing escaped characters correctly, because I've mostly needed the reader so far.

There's one other Python implementation I know of and I think this new one is a good bit more correct and complete. There are 40 some unit tests, just enough to get my needs met. They do not exhaustively stress the specification yet.

There are several implementations in other languages. JSON can be used in AJAX-based systems in lieu of XML. In my case I've been using JSON for simple, yet expressive, configuration files. (I had set out to use YAML. Although simpler than XML it is still a good bit more complex than JSON.)

[Update: Jeremy Kemper points out in a comment that JSON is a subset of YAML. I think it is a sweet spot.]

Not as feature-rich as XML, I think the intent is to keep JSON per se as simple as it is, and layer conventions using JSON itself to represent more complex information (datetime, location, customer, etc.) and "metadata" (version, author, etc.). Don't let the "O" in JSON throw you. An "Object" in JSON is simply a dictionary in Python (and Map in Java), i.e. a set of name/value pairs.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/json-py

The Architecture of the Mobius Strip

Phil Windley and Don Box are wondering about levels of indirection. But are "levels" the best metaphor for where we are in networking today?

"the costs and benefits of indirection layers are well understood"

Generally I agree we can say there are costs *and* benefits, and we know what to look for in terms of "coupling loosely" and measuring impacts.

But in this case is SOAP *another* level of indirection vs. HTTP or just an *alternate* level of indirection? i.e. should we perhaps expect HTTP in more places than we have it today if we look at HTTP as an application protocol rather than a transport protocol?

For example, consider the Java peer-to-peer sockets project. Any application protocol implemented using sockets can run on some peer-to-peer topology. We seem to be in a world that is more like a mobius strip than the expected seven-layer model!

Is HTTP itself a level of indirection, and is it sufficent for machine-machine coordination on the web? If so, then the cost of SOAP (and so some or all of WS-*) as another level of indirection may have a cost that is too high, actually unnecessary.

More Evidence of Sanity in the World

Spain: Gay Marriage Will Soon Be Authorized
Le Nouvel Observateur

Wednesday 21 April 2005

The Congress has adopted a proposed law authorizing marriage between persons of the same sex as well as adoption. Senators are also expected to give their approval. It is anticipated that the law will be implemented this summer.

Symposium on Dynamic Languages

In conjunction with OOPSLA...

ACM Symposium on Dynamic Languages
October 18, 2005, San Diego, California

The goal of this symposium is to provide a highly visible, international forum for researchers working on dynamic features and languages. We explicitly invite submissions from all kinds of paradigms (object-oriented, functional, logic, ...), as can be seen from the structure of the program committee.

More steam.

Angles

Ryan Dawson ponders Tiger and Longhorn...

Business is consistently coded in angle brackets--where platforms don't matter... we need people who find the real problems... How many times have you read the Clue Train Manifesto?

AJAX + CANVAS = Good enough?

Apparently Mozilla (and so Firefox) are getting the element (similar to Safari) and adopted by WHATWG (and so Opera). Whence IE?

(Via Sam Ruby)

Web Algebra

Murray Spork writes in a comment on Bill de hÓra's blog...

I've been saying for a while now that what the Semantic Web needs is more algebra and less logic. - for example the "additive" and "subtractive" qualities of RDF that Bill talks about.

Who I Should Vote For

Who should I vote for in Wales?

Your expected outcome:

Green

Your actual outcome:

	Labour 5
Conservative -19
	Liberal Democrat 49
	UKIP 5
	Green 75
	Plaid Cymru 45

You should vote: Green

The Green Party, which is of course strong on environmental issues, takes a strong position on welfare issues, but was firmly against the war in Iraq. Other key concerns are cannabis, where the party takes a liberal line, and foxhunting, which unsurprisingly the Greens are firmly against. The Greens are also anti-Europe.

Take the test at Who Should You Vote For

Moore's Law

Rich Karlgaard writes in Forbes...

Don Valentine founded Sequoia Capital in 1972 and presided over early investments in Apple, Electronic Arts, Cisco, Yahoo and Google. He once told me the secret to his success: "That's easy. I just follow Moore's Law and make a few guesses about its consequences."

(via Phil Windley)

Too Many "Services"?

Phil Windley wonders...

I'm just not clear on why a simple URL isn't good enough.

Thom Hartmann

Thom Hartmann is now on the air locally in Portland, 6-9am, KPOJ 620 AM, in addition to his national show. Both shows have Internet streams and archives.

XPDX Sprint

I have been out of my office for all but a few days the last four weeks. Somewhere in the middle of that was the XPDX Sprint here in Portland. I was able to attend the first day. Sunday I had to cart a couple of young non-driving men to a couple of malls around town so they could conduct high school psychology experiments.

Catching up on the sprint... I missed the subsequent Tuesday night meeting where a retrospective was conducted. The notes are not making too much sense to me yet.

Here're my recollections from the Saturday... I was in California the week before and back in Oregon about 12 hours, mostly sleeping, before heading downtown to the sprint.

My initial pair was a nice, short, sweet task... we found the source of a core Python bug on Windows that had to do with marshalling and unmarshalling a foating point NaN, in this case an INF. The problem was in the C code though and we had no convenient way to build for windows. Neither did we know what behavior the Python community would want. My partner brought the problem to the sprint so he is going to follow up with the Python email list.

Another group had already split off to work the rest of the day, and the better part of Sunday as far as I know, on Line of Sight Chess. This is now a sourceforge project. LOSC was run as a mini-XP team with planning, iterations, multiple pairs, etc. It looked like fun when I dropped in on them.

Back in the other room we kind of moved around different ideas that never completely gel'd as projects. Several of us spent time getting MoinMoin installed on Windows (and Cygwin for me). Then we set about exploring how MoinMoin actions, macros, etc. work. We noticed funkiness about MM picking up changes vs. going to its cache, so a couple other folks split off and made a good start at fixing that problem when in development mode. The fix broke some other things, and one big problem was just not having the expertise around to keep us moving quickly. Our afternoon was more of a exploratory spike than a planned iteration.

Along the way several of us spent a half hour or so playing with Seaside and had fun conversations about Wiki's, AJAX, continuations, Smalltalk, Scheme, CL, and dynamic languages in general.

I thought the idea of the sprint was sound and the day was fun. For an XP focus I would want to participate more in a session like the LOSC team. Other than my initial pair the rest of the day had little to do with XP.

Oh, we were located right across the street from Good Dog, Bad Dog so lunch was tasty as we gathered outside at Pioneer Courthouse Square.

World-Wide Semi-Structured Data

Some thoughts on Bill's post:

1. It's funny that AI is disparaged in the world of the fuzzy. I am not so familiar with description logic. What little AI I did was with frame-based languages (Carnegie Representation Language, KnowledgeCraft). The data/objects/rules rather than logic-orientation may have been more naturally supportive of open-world attitudes.

2. My understanding of RDF is that it is a concept with many specific representations. Is there an assumed canonical format for gathering the results of a distributed world-wide query?

3. I assume most data query applications do not need to consider the entire web as does a completely free-text application like Google. Subsets of Google apply just to images, just to news, etc. Presumably "just to calendars" is coming. Whether you centralize or decentralize the query, another interesting question will be the conventions for finding the appropriate data.

4. I keep going back to Tom Malone's Information Lens, Object Lens, OVAL series of projects. This was on a much smaller scale than the world, but he did some interesting work on partially-shared views of distributed semi-structured data. (Via the ACM and elsewhere) We need convenient ways to create and evolve partially-shared world-wide data.

5. The more that subsets of semi-structured world data comes into focus for specific applications, the more "queries" will want to include (fuzzy) calculations. Jim Gray's April 2005 ACM Queue article is another interesting tangent on this theme.

No shortage of interesting problems.

Simplest (Overlooked) Things

Core Data looks like a simple, useful data extension to the Next Step, er, Cocoa, framework. (via Bill Bumgarner)

Objective-C and Cocoa seems to be an ongoing counter-example to Jon Udell's take on Microsoft's apparent dynamic language strategy. Jon wrote...

Jim Hugunin, who created first Jython and then IronPython, may be the world's foremost expert on this topic. When I met with him recently, I asked if he thought we'd see official .NET Framework classes written in IronPython. He said that, although dynamic languages will accelerate the development of the framework, extensions written in Python will likely be rewritten in statically-compiled languages for production use. To some dynamic-language advocates that may sound old-fashioned, but to me it sounds pragmatic.

The counter-example is Objective-C itself and the way Next (now Apple) has developed its frameworks. Objective-C makes C available where developers determine to use it, but the key to its capabilities is the dynamic object language cleanly integrated into C.

Objects in the language are fully dynamic and first-class. They enable C and other static languages to participate easily in the object-oriented frameworks without extensions or modifications to those languages. But they also enable dynamic languages to participate easily as well.

Witness the really neat integrations of Python, Smalltalk, and Lisp with the Next Step frameworks. No contortions or compromises, just simple, straightforward integration of reusable frameworks into your language of choice, static or dynamic.

Objective-C and Next/Apple's use of it is underrated and overlooked in its technical simplicity relative to the struggles of dynamic languages in the C++, C#, and Java environments. Notably, this approach dates back to Next's original effort around 1985. This is a twenty year old approach, which satisfies those of us who live in the past. 8^)

Spreadsheets and Databases

Over on the new Smallthought blog there is a conversation about spreadsheets, databases, and end user programming. I added this in a comment, but want to capture it for my own purposes and your enjoyment...

Databases — I have a friend who made a living for a good number of years on a dbase application he wrote for small businesses. Over the years he added more capabilities. He’d go into a new customer’s site, install it, tweak it, maybe implement some new things, and then take the new stuff back to previous customers that may want it. He had no formal software development education or even formal business education. He was a tinkerer, built his own airplane, his own house, etc.

Another story — a friend, MBA in finance, capable of doing decent things with Excel, tried to implement an Access application to track a small golf tournament he was organizing. Nothing ambititous at all. Access presented him with a number of “formal” database concepts that just did not matter to him. He go some things running but mentally associating various tables and forms was not immediately obvious to him, or to me when I looked at it. Maybe it was just us, but even I did not enjoy trying to get Access to do relatively uncomplicated things.

There is a spectrum of choices between a traditional spreadsheet and a traditional database. Perhaps a more usable system in this space would allow someone to begin working more like a spreadsheet and allow shapes to emerge and be supported more like a database, but not expose that support in traditional database terms. The support for those shapes should be more identifiable by the end user programmer without a 20th century software education.

New Lisp

Ted Neward wonders...

Is Ruby the next Lisp? And if so, does that make Ruby a "second chance" for widespread acceptance for Lisp?

I would not say Ruby is the next Lisp. Rather, Ruby is one of the most recent Lisp-like languages. Python is a Lisp-like language going back a decade or whatever longer.

Smalltalk is even a Lisp-like language, as has been noted recently, and Kay states Smalltalk was directly influenced by Lisp. (pdf)

Can I learn to be a better Ruby programmer by learning Lisp, or vice versa?

Yes. For that matter, one can learn to be a better C programmer by learning Lisp. Or Ruby.

If one of Lisp's strengths is writing programs to write programs, does that make Lisp a natural candidate for building DSLs?

Absolutely. And has been in practice for 40 years or more. Literally.

And, again, if the Ruby == modern(Lisp) equation holds true, does that make Ruby a candidate for building DSLs?

Ruby would not be *bad* for building DSL's. The difference with Lisp is the syntax and syntactical tools are not as good for doing this in Ruby as they are in Lisp.

DSL's are best built in Lisp and Smalltalk, somewhat less so in Ruby and Python. But Ruby and Python programmers could argue that pretty well with me. I think I know both of them pretty well but not so well as to say I know I know both of them pretty well.

Python Moving Into the Enterprise

From Slashdot...

"Seems that Python is moving into the enterprise. At the recent PyCon it has become apparent that it's not just Google, GIS, Nokia or even Microsoft anymore. The article points out that Python is increasingly becoming a perfectly viable and even preferred choice for the enterprise. More and more companies are looking at Python as a good alternative to past favorites like Java. Will we finally be able to code for living in a language that's not painful? Exciting times!"

Evolutionary

"There is no such thing as a non-self organizing system." -Esther Derby(?)

Yep

"Poor management can increase software costs more rapidly than any other factor." -Barry Boehm

Buddies, ACL's, and Capabilities

Tim wrote some time ago about making everything network aware, including...

• If you assume ad-hoc networking, you have to automatically define levels of access. I've always thought that the old Unix UGO (User, Group, Other) three-level permission system was simple and elegant, and if you replace the somewhat arbitrary "group" with "on my buddy list," you get something quite powerful. Which leads me to...
• Buddy lists ought to be supported as a standard feature of all apps, and in a consistent way. What's more, our address books really ought to make it easy to indicate who is in a "buddy list" and support numerous overlapping lists for different purposes.

Rather than ACLs, I'd like netware to provide me a list of actions it's capabable of doing on the network, along with an easy way of composing new actions. Then I'd like to make several groups of those actions from all my netware. One grouping for myself, others with decreasing capabilities for family, friends, associates, and the world at large.

My buddy list would then include for each member the groups of capabilities I have granted them. As relationships change I would then be able to increase or decrease their reach into my world.

I've not followed the e-rights world for a while. I wonder where this is going.

Triples, Quads, Quints?

Bill de hÓra writes about RDF, triples, and quads. I think the point is RDF representa triples (X-Y-Z) but he wants to introduce another party into the relationship, e.g. he wants to distinguish (A-(X-Y-Z)) from (B-(X-Y-Z)). Apparently RDF cannot do this concisely, i.e. you need more than A, B, X, Y, and Z in order to denote that A and B relate to the same triple (X-Y-Z) in each in their own way.

Triples, quads, etc. I have to say I've not used RDF at all explicitly.

I guess "quads" are intended to support the (A-(X-Y-Z)) and (B-(X-Y-Z)) relationships concisely.

But, the engineer in me ignorantly wonders, won't we soon run into a desire for a fifth party in this relationship? Why stop at quads?

Quints, hexes, septs. How many is enough?

I wonder if we need a concise way of representing many occurrences of Many-Many relationships. Something like a Star Schema would simplify bulk Many-Many relationships. Bonus, it implies certain expectations about the contents of the relatonships, i.e. you can speak of measurements, occurrences, hierarchies, allocations, headers / details.

Star schemas can be seen as a shorthand notation for many implied individual RDF triples. Bonus, they are proven to be incredibly scalable and support high performance with fairly simple database implementations. The column-based storage approach goes back at least to the 1970's. Another example is Kdb, although "array based" and columnar, it's not explicitly star schema based.

I'm just thinking RDF triples are probably too primitive, and thinking out loud about what might be more expressive. Mostly I am confused about a triple to quad to (?) progression trying to represent increasingly complex relationships. Star schemas encourage a discipline, style, and simplicity into complex relationships that can scale and evolve.

I'll have to learn more about the triple / quad issue and think about this before I can become more coherent on comparing these modeling approaches.

JINI and JavaSpaces

JINI (and therefore JavaSpaces) in action, not inaction, via Tim Bray...

Jini has the fingerprints of Bill Joy and Jim Waldo all over its architecture, and these are obviously two of the Real Smart Guys. Rob Gingell, another one of them, said “Those who do not use Jini are doomed to re-invent it.”

Jini is not just a theoretical triumph; it’s being deployed in large mission-critical applications at places including Orbitz, Orange (the mobile-phone company), Raytheon, and the U.S. Army.

Must (Try) to Understand This?

Sean McGrath writes about "must understand" rules in loosely coupled message passing...

Whatever about the pros and cons of REST versus SOAP, I think it is abundantly clear that the mustUnderstand model [1] is a key concept in developing loosely coupled systems that can evolve independently.

I need April 2 asap.

One thought this does provoke though, for real, is that a sender probably has no business telling a receiver what it must understand or to what degree. I'm all for ways for receivers to describe, more or less formally, what they will understand and how they will understand it. Senders just send messages and set their expectations as best as possible. Hopefully both senders and receivers have robust fallback capabilities.

They Are Principles

Kent Beck writes...

If we abandon our principles at the first sign of trouble, our principles must not be worth much.

I think integrity and accountability are particularly important in a climate of fear.

Democracy Inaction

John Robb wonders...

What we may end up with as part of this push towards "democracy" in the Middle East is civil war. Lebanon, Iraq, and Palestine are all on the brink of it now. Are we better off with this?

Yeah, I think the next chapter is still being written while people rush to chalk up an "ends must justify the means" scenario for democracy breaking out in the mideast.

There are so many directions this could go. Think of this as a complex system that is not very well understood with more than a few elements of chaos.

This is not a "guzinta-guzoutta" simple equation. And no, Bill Maher. I agree Bush stumbled into something, but a fresh pile of democracy in the mideast is not yet clearly the pile he stepped into.

That's the Way of the World

"That's the Way of the World" has been one of my favorite songs for about 30 years. Not one of EW&F's funkier tunes though. "Shining Star" too. A little bit funkier.

(Blaine Buxton likes funk.)

Hubris

Unfortunately, Truly says, the prevailing wisdom at the Pentagon is that "fuel efficiency is for sissies."

(via John Robb)

Hubris. Marines don't eat granola, they just kick the shit out of haj's. Scary when the stereotypes show up in reality.

What Goes Around

(via John Robb)

The MS 13 sprang up in the late 1980s, created by the children of Salvadoran immigrants who fled to California during a bloody civil war.

Can we not think in terms of systems? Everything is compartmentalized and treated as independent, discrete actions. Not only does every action have a reaction, but the systems we are creators of, and participants in, are far more complex than we ever think about in the moment.

Has science taught us nothing about society?

Know(n)Now as AJAX

From FoRK on the AJAX controversy...

"Yeah, I liked that idea the first time around.
When it was called 'KnowNow'."

See also mod_pubsub.

We Build Our Own

The misunderstanding about XP and "doing the simplest thing" is more often than I'd like taken to absurd extremes. For example I encountered a developer recently repeating a claim that an XP team would not use a framework that had been built to simplify a certain style of software development.

Certainly the XP team would want to understand their experience with the framework, the maturity of the framework, and the nature of the problem's suitability for the framework. But not use it, period?

Gack.

So how far does this go?

"I'm not sure we need a computer for this project, but when we do we'll dig up the coal to forge the steel to make the rack to mount the motherboard."

"I'm not sure we need a high-level programming language. We'll use assembly language and see what patterns emerge, then let the higher-level language evolve."

I think there is a spirit and a letter to the law, and the same goes for XP values. Just work in small pieces with concrete feedback. Avoid too much prediction and too many assumptions. Common sense works wonders.

Whence Dynamic Languages

Ryan Tomayko projects what might be necessary to get better late-bound languages acceptance in early-bound organizations...

I think we need something to break through on one of the VMs if we're ever going to move this into the enterprise. There's no way I could bring Python into my place of business on any serious level. This really comes down to it not being blessed as Enterprise Class (blech!) by Sun. It seems we need the VM to get in the door and then maybe we can just move quietly toward CPython with a Java/CLR bridge?

Maybe. The IT industry seems kind of in a "standardization" phase still, following the irrational exhuberence of the "anything goes" phase of the dot.com days. That can translate into the desire to choose one language to standardize on developer resources. I'm not sure getting CPython in would be any more difficult than Jython or IronPython.

We used to have these things called skunkworks. Do such things exist anymore where you can demonstrate value before being judged prematurely on cost? I think maybe but you may need radar detectors along the way.

Frameworks and Plug-ins and Loose Coupling

From ACM Queue about frameworks and plug-ins...

This article identifies some of the concepts around the foundation of pure plug-in architectures and how they affect various stakeholders when taking a plug-in approach. The intention is to discuss the general issues involved, but the article also presents some lessons learned from Eclipse (www.eclipse.org) to better illustrate some of the concepts.

The main problem with a framework like Eclipse is that so many unnecessary dependencies are forced on plug-in developers. You have to buy the full Eclipse approach to get even half the benefits.

What lessons have we learned in the last 15 years of building frameworks like this? Are we having trouble understanding what is important, what has been learned already in the software industry?

Why build a framework like Eclipse in the 21st century when you could build a framework like FIELD which was built in the 1980s? Certainly the full benefits of Eclipse could be built *using* an approach like FIELD's. Plug-ins that did not or could not support the full benefits of Eclipse would then have fall-back positions. New approaches could evolve that stretch beyond the imaginary boundaries of the current Eclipse framework.

What is it about FIELD? Well FIELD is based on integrated components loosely coupled via asynchronous message passing.

That may ring a bell for 21st century programmers.

Reconciling Modal Web Apps and Rest

Mark Baker comments on how continuation-based modal web applications fit the REST style...

"This is how most web applications work.". Actually, it isn't. Most Web applications are stateless. Of those that aren't, the vast majority are only stateful for authentication purposes.

Here's how I've started to view the relationship of the modal web app style and the REST style:

• Work-in-pogress interactions seem to be programmed AJAX-style, GOTO-style, Modal-style, or "richer-client" style.
• Modal web applications simplify programming controllers for work-in-progress over HTTP.
• Continuation-based interactions are not necessarily RESTful.
• As work-in-progress is "published" those pieces of work become resources with various representations, etc.
• Publishing (perhaps partially as a "proposal") completed work as resources can be RESTful.
• Accessing (perhaps partially) completed work as resources can be RESTful.

So I think modal and RESTful can be seen as somewhat complementary styles or at least aimed at different purposes. Perhaps they don't have to be completely unified if they meet their purposes with little risk of interference between implementations.

Extreme Refactoring

Again Keith Ray, this time on design, refactoring, and language choice...

Brian Button decided to explore refactoring by taking the Video Store example from Martin Fowler's book and refactoring it into methods one line long, no private methods, and aggressively removing all duplication, particularly duplication of iteration over containers.

His starting point (and Fowler's ending point) is the class named "Customer", containing a list of rentals. It has private methods for calculating rental cost and "frequent renter points", and a large method for printing the customer's statement. Brian's ending point is seven classes: Customer, RentalStatement, RentalCollection, Collector, LineItemPrinter, FrequentPointsTotaller, RentalCostTotaller.

If he had been programming in Ruby or Smalltalk instead of C#, he probably could have met his goals with only first two classes. Blocks and iteration methods built into Smalltalk/Ruby collection classes would have eliminated the need to create the other five classes.

Agile Data

Keith Ray writes about agile data...

He asked audience members to raise their hands if they could make a simple change (like renaming a column of a table) and re-deploy their database and associated apps in the same day. Only one guy, in a large room filled with database people, raised his hand (I bet that guy worked at Yahoo, Amazon, or Google.) That guy's DB had terabytes of data and 37 apps depending on it, but he could deploy a change in less than one day.

Ambler also asked audience members to raise their hands if their database and associated apps had extensive automated testing. The same guy raised his hand, and maybe one other.

Bill Maher

I saw Bill Maher live last night. He was recording an HBO special and DVD in Portland. Maher is a good observer and funny commentator of American politics, religion, and culture. He is irreverent and holds nothing back. He's more of a traditional humorist like Mark Twain or Woody Guthrie than Jon Stewart. But he goes beyond Stewart and Lewis Black topically and stylistically. (I missed seeing Black on stage when he was in Portland a few months ago.)

These three along with Harry Shearer are four people worth listening to for insight into the state of the union with varying degrees of subtlety and style.

Boo and IronPython

Edd Dumbill tried IronPython and now prefers Boo. Another Python friend was thinking of trying Boo too. The problem I have with that is I'd rather the bulk of my code not be tied to a specific platform, which Boo seems to do. Boo runs on MSFT dotnet as well as Mono, but still requires the CLR platform.

Edd raises significant concerns about IronPython. Rather than a somewhat handcuffed Boo, I would think a Python programmer would be very well off with regular CPython and bridging to dotnet via the Python.Net dll's.

Attitudes Toward SISC and Continuations

Chris Double used SISC running in the JVM to build a continuation-based modal web server. He wrote of the manager's and developers' experiences...

This approach has worked well for me and the performance is quite usable. Although I do get constant requests from the project manager to find a way to rewrite things in Java as he never was a fan of using Scheme and is concerned it may put customers of the system off it. The developers on the other hand seem to have enjoyed learning Scheme and consider it an advantage over Java.

Listen.

The Secret Sauce

(via Blaine Buxton) Eliot Miranda divulges...

VisualWorks and VW/GemStone combinations are used in sectors such as cpu manufacture, container shipping and derivatives trading on a world scale (i.e. they handle a substantial fraction of the world's activities in these sectors). But for nearly two decades the corporations who have built these applications have viewed their use of Smalltalk as a strategic advantage, and hence prevented the vendors from using the applications in marketing material.

Python Performance

Good news, but let's not get too sweaty over this...

IronPython is markedly faster on PyStone than CPython.

...remembering the CPython VM does not really push the envelope of VM techniques.

IronPython at PyCon

Technorati has dug up a list of items on IronPython at PyCon this week. I've not consumed any of them yet, but hopefully they will be enjoyable.

It looks like the new release of IronPython depends on the Yukon CLR. So for now it looks like CPython with the Python.Net assembly bridge is the approach of choice for "real" uses. With a bit of care Python code could then port over to IronPython.

Not sure what the language level of IronPython will be vs. CPython when Yukon is released.

Alan Kay (again) on Software Engineering

Kay's interview has made the rounds more than once, but with recent posts on software as engineering or craft, let's go back to the guru...

If you look at software today, through the lens of the history of engineering, it’s certainly engineering of a sort—but it’s the kind of engineering that people without the concept of the arch did. Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves...

I would compare the Smalltalk stuff that we did in the ’70s with something like a Gothic cathedral. We had two ideas, really. One of them we got from Lisp: late binding. The other one was the idea of objects. Those gave us something a little bit like the arch, so we were able to make complex, seemingly large structures out of very little material, but I wouldn’t put us much past the engineering of 1,000 years ago...

I finally understood that the half page of code on the bottom of page 13 of the Lisp 1.5 manual was Lisp in itself. These were “Maxwell’s Equations of Software!” This is the whole world of programming in a few lines that I can put my hand over...

All of these ideas could be part of both software engineering and computer science, but I fear—as far as I can tell—that most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training...

In a history of Smalltalk I wrote for ACM, I characterized one way of looking at languages in this way: a lot of them are either the agglutination of features or they’re a crystallization of style. Languages such as APL, Lisp, and Smalltalk are what you might call style languages, where there’s a real center and imputed style to how you’re supposed to do everything. Other languages such as PL/I and, indeed, languages that try to be additive without consolidation have often been more successful. I think the style languages appeal to people who have a certain mathematical laziness to them. Laziness actually pays off later on, because if you wind up spending a little extra time seeing that “oh, yes, this language is going to allow me to do this really, really nicely, and in a more general way than I could do it over here,” usually that comes back to help you when you’ve had a new idea a year down the road. The agglutinative languages, on the other hand, tend to produce agglutinations and they are very, very difficult to untangle when you’ve had that new idea.

One clear implication is that language you use has a significant impact on your ability to do software engineering. Your language is your most highly used tool.

Do Good for America - Use Lisp

(via Lemonodor)

François-René Rideau implores...

The obsession with parsing and syntax in computer science curricula is hurting America.

SPLJ Part 2.

Mark Baker suggests...

The resource oriented (RESTful) solution would exhibit greater degrees of architectural properties such as scalability, visibility, and simplicity than the service oriented solution, because RESTful solutions embody architectural constraints which induce those properties.

SPLJ

In the raw...

Applications remain largely discrete things, whether they’re wired together with RPC, SOAP or REST. Only slightly, (particularly around the blogosphere) are we seeing the pieces joining together.

Preventing Death

Somewhere around 13,000 children die of hunger-related causes every day around the world. I wonder when the US congress will subpoena them to come testify. Certainly they will get at least a snack on the airplane.

Certainly the congress can do something to save at least one of those lives each day. That's at least 364 more lives saved each year than can be saved in the case in Florida.

How much longer can our "culture of life" continue to ignore millions of deaths a year?

New for Who?

Depends on what the meaning of "new" is...

I firmly believe that the new advances in languages will borrow heavily from languages invented three decades ago such as Lisp and Smalltalk.

According to Alan Kay, computer professionals were smarter back then, because computing was still an esoteric technology. Now, we have a pop culture when colleges are essentially vocational schools.

...from Wesner Moise.

The Damage Done

James Robertson hopes for the best...

I guess the only good things about binary XML and WS* is that the people involved aren't doing greater harm somewhere else.

Seems like a fairly wide swath of damage from this vantage point.

I have a feeling things are just getting started too. Look out. CORBA took a long time to get to a moderately usable interoperable condition. For better or worse (we'll see) that increasing utility and popularity ultimately led to its current status, dying a slow death.

Math

(via Paul Graham)

I found, when I was studying mathematics, that 2 things were true: (1) the teacher was not too good and (2) the book was not too good. So I would always buy a half-dozen books on the topic and try to get the full picture by reading the same sections in each book. The combination helped me understand much more than the sum of the content. Also, I was never opposed to reading something as much as 10 times until I squeezed everything out of it.

I had the same problem, but I was not as diligent in overcoming it.

Old World Distributed Computing

Steve Loughran writes...

By adding all the functions of CORBA to SOAP, WS-* replicates the old world of distributed computing, only with underpinnings (HTTP, XML) not designed for that particular role.

Opposites

James Robertson writes about problems with the "common" language runtime. Some of the comments are suggesting you gotta take the good with the bad. I don't buy it and don't believe the commentators know about which they speak. Read on...

If you want the best of Smalltalk (or Python or Lisp) and access to dotnet as well then use a bridge between runtimes. (Smalltalk bridge, Python bridge, Lisp bridge)

I see no reason that all languages have to run in a crippled VM like the CLR or the JVM when you can get to these via bridges that keep them at arms length. The alternative is you cripple the language and lose most of the tools that make you productive in the first place.

I think any "common language runtime" has to be built at the foundation on good technology. Crippled languages can then be built on top rather than vice-versa. This was demonstrated on Lisp machines where Fortran, C, Pascal, Ada, etc. compilers were ported.

Funny that when good languages are ported to crippled runtimes, the good languages suffer. But when these languages were ported to the Lisp machine, the crippled languages became *more* capable than their original designs.

I've used C on the Lisp Machine. I can say, and everyone I know with the same experience agrees, this is the *best* environment for developing C programs. The same is never true for good languages ported to the CLR or JVM.

Maybe they'll get there some day. Maybe.

GoDaddy and Free DNS

Like Dave I use GoDaddy for inexpensive domain registration. I have for several years. I use it for sites they host (e.g. my son volunteers time and helps with web stuff for Arin's House) and sites I host elsewhere.

Dave's wondering about DNS for sites hosted elsewhere. I use ZoneEdit.

Croquet or Cannon?

I've got to put Croquet on my list of things to do. Every so often I see another post and look around, and wonder why I haven't tried it yet.

Here is an example of a window containing Flash content. Flash and other media forms may rendered on any polygon or combination of polygons within a scene. It should be kept in mind that it is not at all necessary for the frame of any window to be rendered. Therefore it is possible to have flash animations or media output of any size be rendered in any orientation or configuration within the Croquet space.

Being There

Update: added reference for W.Cunningham quote.

Bill de hÓra writes how keys to software success can be found in the business and operating models you adopt. Heed this advice.

We can be successful with the latest "service orchestration" software or with Smalltalk and relational databases, both decades old. (I think the latter may provide an advantage.) The keys are in how we form teams, communicate, and do work.

I would ban the phrase "service-oriented anything" until my organization understood this paragraph...

The reason in the past we needed to worry that 'it will never X' is because there is an assumption built into the procurement, requirements and development phases that systems of this kind get finished and that's it - no more money for active development. You have one shot to get it right. In turns out that one shot is an operational myth and a dangerous one at that - business systems are never really finished, but thinking that they are radically affects thereafter how budget is dispensed and for what.

Test-driven development is proving to be the operating model for continuously adding value to a system. We need equivalent models for the business that surrounds development.

• Whole teams.
• Communication.
• Frequent feedback.
• Test-driven.
• Continuous integration.

Ward Cunningham illustrates that the burden will land on middle and upper management as developers get their act together...

A common management mistake is to keep everyone busy by giving them different things to do. This basically tells people to work alone, and that is an easy way to fall prey to exactly [all] sorts of fears.

Agile asks the team to work together on only a few things at a time. That way, once someone gets over the wall, they can help everyone else over after.

Customers ask for a lot because they don't think they will ever get a chance to ask for more. Regular delivery of capability that doesn't go away will erase this fear in customers.

Dynamic Languages on the CLR

Jason Zander has a post that mentions dynamic languages on the Microsoft CLR. But don't get your hopes up yet.

Dynamic Languages

We had several questions about our philosphy on dynamic languages. I think I'll actually write a separate blog post on this one because it is such an interesting subject. A few quick notes for now:

I believe we already have a great platform for dynamic languages. You get the GC, exceptions, interop, and access to a huge set of libraries for free when you target the CLR.

That's nice marketing but not much information. Let's hope for the real post, and see what else he says here...

In Whibey we add Lightweight Code Gen (LCG) which further eases the ability to author the languages.

Alright. There's something. I wonder how the code generated supports dynamic languages.

Because we also built generics deeply into the runtime, you can leverage that support dynamically at runtime without having to "fake it out". This is a distinct advantage over techniques that use "erasure" to replace syntax with expanded code.

How is this an advantage for dynamic languages? "Because all our other programmer have to deal with rigid, unnecessary language constructs, we've preserved them at runtime so you can figure out how deal with them too!"

Thanks for that. What else have you done to make the CLR "compelling" on the Windows platform? Continuing...

Because you target our MSIL and type system, we also enable easy access to tons of tools that work across langauges seemlessly.

As opposed to the tons of cool tools that have been working in Lisp and Smalltalk for literally decades that do *not* require a "type system". Great fun... "Use dynamic languages in our world and as a bonus you get to understand our rigid type system."

By now I am feeling really frustrated and pessimistic. I am learning nothing about support for dynamic languages and only about how those languages will have to work with all the other rigid conventions of poorer languages. No news is good news compared to this.

I expect in the future to do a Project 7 style approach to adding more improvements to the engine, just like we did in the late 90's to form the current engine.

Any ideas what kind of improvements there will be for dynamic languages, your topic of conversation?

And finally a quick plug for Jim Hugunin who is doing a keynote at Pycon next week.

Finally there may be some information. Hugunin apparently has not posted since October. He's not participated in the IronPython email list. And recently someone *outside* Microsoft created a sourceforge site for IronPython fixes.

Maybe Sun can do better.

Programming

James Robertson writes...

There are a lot of developers who will have a really hard time letting go of the idea that all inbound CS people should take a compiler class. Ask yourself though - how many people are doing that kind of work, and how many are creating what amounts to glorified reporting interfaces?

I actually believe all programmers should have several compiler courses.

As it turns out a programmer friend with a mechanical engineering degree has been taking EE and CS courses over the last couple of years. He just completed a compiler course. He created an interesting SQL compiler for file systems as his final project.

I was reminded of the deeper value of learning the basics of compiling. We talked a few times over the semester, and his discovery process was familiar. The surprise he found building compilers are the regularity, and the patterns that decompose complex problems into combinations of simpler ones. Of course "back in my day" we did not have names for all these patterns, but the lessons are the same. The lessons learned building compilers can be applied to many other programming problems.

More advance compiler courses teach about the mathematics and engineering of representations and transformations of data. Denotational semantics, continuations, even "types" (gasp! I said it) are worthy topics that all programmers should understand.

Distributed Build Architecture

Vincent Massol proposes a distributed build architecture using JavaSpaces...

I personally prefer this architecture over one where the orchestrator directly sends build requests to build agents as I find it more scalable and more flexible.

Yeah, and robust as well. Just watch for that place where the build agent does a 'read' for a request. It should be a 'take'. Before the take though it should 'write' it's intent to take perhaps including an estimated time of completion. Then if it fails, another process can monitor the results and restore the request if it suspects or detects the agent failed to complete.

If the request included an estimate of time to build then build agents can predict their loads and which requests they should accept. These estimates can come from actual builds and improve themselves over time. Many possibilities for coordinated processes to evolve on their own through "metadata".

Would you like such a distributed build system?

Actually I'd rather use tools that did not require such massive builds, but the idea applies generally to many kinds of transformation activities. This is an ideal example of services built using simple, general coordination mechanisms.

You can build *all* kinds of coordination patterns using the simple Linda-like vocabulary.

Urp or ERP?

Notably the new Windows product VP has a background selling to customers with indigestion.
=8^o

Worth the Investment?

Alan Knight provides another story to guide your investment in software choices...

I spent last week in Cincinnati, at Cincom headquarters, in a variety of meetings. The meetings were quite good, as meetings go. The last day was spent in meetings with a large customer who has some very important systems dependent on VW. They had some very nice things to say about Smalltalk being the most stable piece of their information systems.

But it's so... different.

Yes, it is. And that's a *good* thing.

Coordinating Webs of Information

More from Jon Udell...

On today's Web, security, asynchrony, reliability, routing, and proxying are, in general, aspects of the data communications layer. On tomorrow's Web they'll be aspects of the application layer, and we'll operate more like weavers of business processes than plumbers of networks.

I'm not sure I understand this vision, but I'm also not sure I agree with my understanding of it.

The best way to build a web of information and processing appears to go back to blackboard architectures in the 1970's. These ideas also proved to be agile for a more broad set of coordination problems. Today's web is showing an approach along these lines may be effective at scaling to the world for machine-machine as well as human-machine.

I thoroughly doubt "we'll operate more like weavers of business processes than plumbers of networks". We need to hide business processes as much as possible, favoring coordination via semi-structured data showing up here and there on flexible networks of cooperating-yet-arms-length processes.

BKM's

Jon Udell asks...

Why must we make everything into a rivalry? Why can't we just enjoy the best of all worlds? That's how I use programming languages, that's how I use operating systems, and that's how I intend to use this stuff too.

Because we are confused. Or at least I am. About what *is* the best of all worlds. And there is a cost to all this. Combining Python, Smalltalk, and Java is one thing. But what are the Pythons, Smalltalks, and Javas of this new industry?

When you see so much, well, stuff, being flung at the wall, why wait to see what sticks? Go with what seems simple enough and works already. Doing that much is hard enough. Let others invest in prediction.

Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future.
-Niels Bohr

Accretion vs. Evolution

Also from James Robertson, on accretion of features in popular programming systems, if not most software.

Java/JVM and C#/CLR evolution is interesting to watch as compared to the history of Smalltalk and Lisp. Consider how drastically Lisp changed from 1960 to 1970 or so, and the same for Smalltalk from 1970 to 1980. They had real developers using them in real situations, but the pressure to stagnate or the pressure to accrete cruft rather than replace it was not there.

Not only did Lisp and Smalltalk languages and tools support evolution as well as backward compatibility, the culture and organization encouraged even drastic swings in features.

J/J and C/C do not have those benefits, neither technical nor organizational. They are ultimately doomed, so the word to the wise would seem obviously to get off those platforms ASAP. Invest in systems that have proven themselves already for decades.

Do You *Like* Handcuffs?

Ramon Leon writes...

With or without Seaside, Smalltalk needs to return to the mainstream. The current crop of mainstream languages, pretty much feel like handcuffs in comparison.

Numbers Games

Jono Bacon writes...

Bear in mind that the headlines may simply be an illusion in an industry where the real success stories are happening all around you.

Yeah, but...

James Robertson is looking for a MSFT course correction...

You know what? As far as I'm concerned, MetaWebLog API sucks, Atom is pointless, and SOAP is a huge duplication of CORBA on port 80. But you know what else? It doesn't matter what I think, because I have to support these things anyway. Whoever runs Product Management/Marketing for IE - it's time to fire their sorry butt, get someone new in there, and slap them around with a cluestick until they get it. I'm tired of paying the IE penalty for CSS, and so is everyone else.

Yeah, but XAML and Avalon are going to be so, um, compelling.

Really.

Reference Relevance

As seen in an email list for dotnet programming...

Passing a reference type by value lets the callee manipulate the object that is referenced. Passing a reference type by reference lets the callee manipulate the reference to the object itself - to change where the caller's reference points.

Such are the things one gets to sweat about when the language is not as simple as possible.

Yeah, I know.

And ouch...

One thing to keep in mind when is that the 'ref' is very important when you cross application boundaries. Specifically this applies to .NET Remoting. If a parameter is labeled with 'ref' it will copy the changes back to the caller. This differs significantly from calling a member function locally.

We're Waiting Already

From CNET...

"It's a little depressing that developers are just now wrapping their heads around these things we shipped in the late 20th century," said Charles Fitzgerald, Microsoft's general manager for platform technologies. "But XAML is in a whole other class. This other stuff is very kludgy, very hard to debug. We've seen some pretty impressive hacks, but if you look at what XAML starts to solve, it's a major, major step up."

Please actually *deliver* something newfangled, and show us why its significantly better than the older technology. Then you might generate more buzz than Google.

But then again what about Firefox? Opera? Safari? Charles... I think you've got a lesson or two to go with XAML. You may know more than I do about how you'll win this one, but either show your entire hand or get back to work.

(via Jim)

Asynchronous SQLServer Messaging

High on my reading list, from MSDN on SQL Server 2005...

"Get an overview of how the new Service Broker functionality in SQL Server 2005 enables faster and easier development of SQL Server applications that rely upon asynchronous, queued operations."

The Future of Data

Martin Fowler writes...

If applications were more aware of version control then I think we would see more interesting things being done with it. I hope that a solid, usable, open source tool will spread the usage of version control to a wider audience - after all we are no longer short of disk space.

I have to agree, and think Subversion's support for WebDAV and API could help get there. Thinking back about a year, where I speculate...

From working on systems in a half dozen domains I have come to the conclusion there are three simple patterns we should lean on for making documents and messages persistent.

• Tuples Spaces (think Ruple Forums) for in-progress, state machine-like transactions and collaboration.
• Versioned document trees (think Subversion's file system) for long-lived, shared, document editing.
• Star Schema-based storage (think Sybase IQ, a simple, low-maintenance, scalable database technology) for read-only transaction history and analysis.

I deeply believe (it is my hypothesis) that these are the only patterns you need, and the implementations going forward can become far simpler and adaptable than all of today's cruft.

Emacszen

"Danny, after oscillating between NetBeans and Eclipse for several years, gets a surge of Zen and orders the Emacs Manual"

Success'ing

Ryan Tomayko writes... From the beginning, WS-* has been approached incorrectly. The approach that we're advocating is to first embrace and understand existing web architecture and then to gradually enhance (constrain) it to meet the needs of new requirements. We advocate this not because we think it's a better way to be successful, we think it's the only way to be successful. [That's some claim! Is "success" even defined in this case? -Patrick]

An example of the approach we're advocating is Bill de hÓra's recent proposal for reliable messaging over HTTP, (HTTPLR). The difference between the HTTPLR approach and the WS-ReliableMessaging approach is that Bill's proposal builds on simple proven web architecture without requiring additional apparatus.

This is interesting even inside the firewall.

April XPDX Code Sprint

The April XPDX code sprint (Extreme Programming in Portland, Oregon) is on for April 9-10.

We'll be using Python in several flavors: CPython, Jython, maybe IronPython, and Python.Net (CPython with the dll's to integrate with dotnet).

Also in attendance will be Smalltalk. Seaside with Squeak and VisualWorks, at the least.

The official April meeting, the following Tuesday evening, will be a retrospective on the sprint via Diana Larson.

Amazonian Art

Try these (via Lemonodor)...

• Lisp
• Smalltalk
• Python
• Ruby

D-Bate

Stu sez to Sean...

Does this cost a lot of money? Depends on what you define as "a lot".

And Avram Levinski adds...

Personally I think the whole WS-* is a gambit extended to outflank Java.

Before Tom closes with...

Stu mentioned: "Architecture groups are becoming keepers of the canonical schemas."

Kiss of Death. Just pack up and go home now.

Recombinant Gems

Carlos Perez keeps on putting out gems (with links to past gems as well). I am really enjoying these...

One key to a solution is the need for a recombinant architecture. That is a framework that will allow rapid assembly of components like we never seen before.

Apps

Danny Ayers writes...

I’d opt for a triplestore and Python, but even today we’re only just starting to see shrinkwrap apps moving to non-proprietary languages and interfaces.

The Race is On -- Where's the Goal Line?

From Infoworld...

What I thought would be a Java lovefest turned into a "How do we fend off Microsoft?" debate.

The consensus was that .Net is a strong technology but that Java provides the advantages and disadvantages of more community participation. While more amenable to community contributions than perhaps .Net is, it is thus more difficult to build a consensus on improvements than the monolithic .Net platform, which is controlled by Microsoft.

For the time being, both Java and .Net shall remain the dominant platforms. There may not be a victor, but continued coexistence for years to come.

I'm curious whether the interesting race is the emerging-yet-not-fully-realized race to "fully" support dynamic languages on these platforms.

Debasing

Danny Ayers writes...

It seems to me that a very large proportion of today’s user-oriented Web applications could run as CRUD. We’ve already got a fair idea how to separate content from presentation. But the business logic is usually all tangled up in a combination of SQL tables (and maybe triggers etc) and objects/procedures or other relatively hard-coded representation...

A part of the reason that middle layer has tended to grow over time is the mismatch between the logic provided by the database and the real-world data it has to manage (...much of this is to do with the design of SQL databases, not Codd’s model). Another problem is... up-front design of database schema... There isn’t much flexibility for continuous development at the back end, so things get pushed forward. Not very eXtreme.

...replacing the back end relational database with a triplestore, SQL with SPARQL and schemas with ontologies. Bit of RESTful HTTP and XML for the transport, bit of XSLT for the presentation layer (with HTML forms, XForms, XMLHttpRequest, whatever you like). There’s no reason why the whole lot couldn’t be generated from a set of statements, although a bit of PHP template hacking may be needed in the interim…

Yes, this is the old Semantic Web chestnut rewritten for a new generation…or rather, the generation that got quicker results with Dbase years back…

The Road Ahead

Mitch Kapor writes...

The challenge now is whether Ray and Groove, which represent forces of architectural innovation, can have a successful impact at Microsoft, which after all, is a large (58,000 person), middle-aged (30 year-old) company. It's hard to know whether the loss of nimbleness due to size and age is a greater challenge to Microsoft than is open source.

Groove and Croquet

Hugh Pyle writes some things about being owned by the borg and innovations...

What will become of Groove now? Good things, I think. After all, the only competitive architecture within a couple of decades is Alan Kay's mallet.

I wonder how Groove and Croquet line up. They seem fairly different on the surface.

Evolution

Sean McGrath writes about SOAP...

Behind the firewall, nobody can hear you scream and nobody can see your wallet bleed.

Success should also be measured by an ability to evolve. Building a system once is not the challenge.