Dynamic Aspects has published their upcoming OOPSLA presentation of domain/object, the language underlying their Java IDE. There is a remarkable correspondence between their ideas and my own. This makes reviewing their paper a difficult proposition: it would be easy to nitpick over differences; but it would be equally easy to falsely read my own ideas between the lines of theirs. Continue reading “domain/object”
The Currency of Development
One of the anonymous reviewers of my OOPSLA paper made the point, paraphrasing, that the main problem in software development is not the difficulty of programming, but the difficulty of getting a development project to function effectively. This is usually seen as the subject of methodology, with “extreme†and “agile†methods being the latest trends. My initial reaction to this criticism was to point to the example of spreadsheets, which make a certain class of problems simple enough to be solved by an end-user or power-user themselves, without enduring the trials and tribulations of a professionally staffed development project. Even on such multi-person projects, reducing the programming effort ought to reduce the size of the team and the number of interactions subject to error. However the fundamental point of the criticism remains true: the biggest problem in software development is teamwork. It has occurred to me that the design philosophy of Subtext can contribute to solving this problem. Continue reading “The Currency of Development”