Again in praise of Smalltalk…

Ecris le 8 juillet 2005
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Thin Air presents a very interesting report from Smalltalk solution. It gives this point of view from Eric Evans on modeling languages:

One of the points Eric made in his talk was that he preferred language rather than pictures for modeling, and as such, he preferred modeling in Smalltalk or Java rather than UML.

What puzzle me is that all the main gurus I can read over the Web seem to agree on the fact that Smalltalk is the best general language ever released to computer science. How can they not use their influence to make it wider spread?

remerciements

Ecris le 2 juillet 2005
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Aller, on lance un thread special remerciements! ;-)Je remercie ?galement les membres de cette listes (les petits et les grands) car ce sont bien eux qui m’ont permis de d?couvrir l’agilit?, et quelque part, d’en etre l? ou j’en suis aujourd’hui (c’est ? dire pas tr?s loin, mais c’est d?j? pas mal pour moi)Par ailleurs, c’est aussi gr?ce ? cette liste (et aux r?unions de praticiens) que j’ai pu rencontrer quelques geants, dont certains sont devenus des coll?gues pour mon plus grand plaisir.Serieusement, il ya surement des choses ? am?liorer ici, mais on est d?j? plutot dans l’outstanding, sans parler des innovations issues des membres telle par exemple que le DOJO.Tout cela pourrait faire clan ou famille, mais ce n’est pas le cas dans la pratique. D’ailleurs, la r?gle veux que tout nouveau venu dans les r?unions de praticien se fasse inviter par les autres! :-)

XP2005: first feedback for Laurent’s Dojo

Ecris le 20 juin 2005
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For some professional bad reasons, I was not able to attend XP2005 as initially planned.That’s why I am looking for feedbacks from Sheffield and first one is quite encouraging: Laurent and Emmanuel workshop on their concept of Dojo attracted attention from Dave and Uncle Bob! That’s really good news for me to see that the efforts of those two XP-France fellows are going in the good direction.Keep on working guys; we are walking in your steps!

Offshore versus agile

Ecris le 19 juin 2005
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It happens sometime that one of my customer ask me about offshore development. When such question comes, I ask “why do you want to offshore this?” and the answer is always the same: for the price. Not for quality, not for innovation, not to improve the company products: it is just to cut the cost.

Suppose you have a project to develop, and the cost estimation is 1000, but your budget is 200. You have two solutions:

For sure, the offshore path is the easiest one when you don’t understand why the project has been initiated, and where the difficulties are: “Somebody told me it cost 1000, let put it where somebody will accept to do it for 200″. If you are in this situation, my advice is to seek for an out-of-the-self software package. Indeed, it will avoid you the difficult taks of understanding the domain, and you will have some sales person to negociate the price with.

The other path is more complex: you have to understand very well your business and where your are going to find this 200 project within the 1000 project that will leverage it. That’s a difficult task, the kind of tasks that make the difference between succeeding companies and the others.

Then, my advice is the following:

Banking software are definitely not like Airbus planes?

Ecris le 18 juin 2005
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Thanks to James Robertson, I came across this column, ranting against OOP. Nothing very interesting in the argumentation. For instance, taken in his ranting fever, the author states:

If Airbus or Boeing built aircraft like the IT industry builds software, aircraft would constantly be dropping out of the sky.

Take a look to this post if you want to know why Airbus are not dropping out of sky.Anyway, programming is a difficult task, and we should not blame anybody to not understand all the concepts. A good starting point for the author could be to try to follow Dave’s patterns to improve his OO skills.What picked my interest was this paragraph:

For example, there’s a little thing in the banking world called “reconciliation”. It means tracking down and fixing the host of small errors introduced by the users of the system - people, in other words.

I have three comments:

1) Reconciliation is the human task of fixing errors introduced by the computers.

2) Do not try to have zero reconciliation: this is like seeking for 0 defects. Try instead to cover the 80% easy cases automatically, and leave the other for human professional of the domain.

3) Discrepancies and reconciliation in a large bank cannot be avoided. They are generated by the collision of two opposing forces, evolving with different rythm:

The interface and the management of those two different forces are the main challenges of a banking architect. And, of course, OO can help you manage the difference of evolution rythms beetween domains.But instead of seeking Visual Basic or Perl script, start by an efficient easy to learn language.
;-)

wxSqueak: impressive!

Ecris le 15 juin 2005
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Another squeak find: wxSqueak.

You should give a try to the demos: they are impressive! Squeak had already the best WebApp framework, now it has also a very nice rich GUI framework! What else should we look for?

Thank you very much to both of you Avi and Rob!!!

Update: wxSqueak at StS2005

A nice little Smalltalk tutorial

Ecris le 15 juin 2005
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Just found this very nice little tutorial for Smalltalk and Squeak by Wilkes Joiner.

Read an enjoy ;-)

Resist for promotion, until you can accept it

Ecris le 12 juin 2005
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Dave Hoover is currently doing a wonderful job of formalizing apprenticeship patterns for software programmers. He recently described two very interesting patterns: For love, not money, and Resist the promotion. In this last pattern, Dave states the following:

Craftsmen must not be fooled into believing that you can be a “technical manager”, since every day that you are not programming is another step down the wrong path.

This reminds me some thoughts I had during the last XP France session. The main issue was about the difference between master and apprentice, or more generally between more advanced programmers, and the one who is not.

The advanced programmers knows that things that might seem boring are not, and are indeed very important: writing automatic build script, cleaning the code and the comments, naming carefully variables, classes and methods. All those things are like “Sweeping the floor”, and they are the starting point for apprentices. But the master keep doing them to show how those things are important and are mandatory. By doing them himself, it give to them the “master” dimension.

The judo master (actually, I don’t know his Japanese name) knows also that he must provide the Dojo, and provides also some public to motivate the judoka to perform their art. This is a kind of a context enabling the art to happen and progress.I think there are similar things in programming. The master knows that some tasks must be done to enable the programming task: finding sponsorship, giving feedback to sponsors, managing actors who are not part of the team, etc. All those things which are sometime called “management” or maybe “politics”. You could prefer to have a specialized manager doing that full time, but how could he still really understand the needs of the programmers?

For sure, those tasks are not programming, but maybe, a master has the ability to keep an eye on all of them, at the same time, and drive them into the right direction to enable the programming task to happen in the best possible context.

You must resist for promotion if accepting it will put you away totally of programming, but maybe, you could be at a sufficient level to keep doing it, while addressing more managerial tasks.

Hence, resist for promotion, until you can accept it ;-)

Scott Berkun’s blog

Ecris le 5 juin 2005
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Following Werner Vogel’s advice, I just discovered the Scott Berkun’s blog. Indeed, this is a great essayist. Have a look to it.

Moreover, there is a forum where you can interact with Scott. Somebody asked him to compare Apple and Microsoft design strategy. Scott’s analysis of centralized versus distributed design strategies is very interesting.

OS/X for every body?

Ecris le 5 juin 2005
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The web is currently waiting for the announce tomorrow of the Apple technology shift from IBM to Intel. This would be great news. At some stage, we could expect to have a generalization of OS/X to all Intel platforms (maybe 90% of the market). OS/X has several advantages over Microsoft equivalents:

Overall, this is obviously a very nice framework to develop professional applications, closer to a Smalltalk model than was Windows/Java.We are maybe seeing the end of the Java domination, and the come back of the Smalltalk camp? ;-)
Update: The news is confirmed: Apple will shift to Intel, but it’s too early to have them officially state that other hardware than Apple could be supported by OS/X:

However, Schiller said the company does not plan to let people run Mac OS X on other computer makers’ hardware. “We will not allow running Mac OS X on anything other than an Apple Mac.”

I would not bet too much on this statement ;-)

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