Cool Code v Working Code
By Martin English | October 25, 2006
Developers and Administrators under the age of thirty have no idea why old farts like me are sceptical of the productivity claims, why we roll our eyes at the hype and buzzwords that sell books and consulting engagements, about the amzing new programming language / technique / methodology du jour. Occassionally, it’s because we’ve seen it all before. IBM systems running multiple operating system instances ? Sounds like good ole MVS to me….
For example, the current state of play is that Sun’s JRuby team (Sun hired key Ruby developers Thomas Enebo and Charles Nutter, back in September) has just released JRuby 0.9.1 for Java, with version 1.0 is expected in due course.
Apparently, going from JRuby 0.9.1 to 0.9.0 apparently brings a 50 to 60 per cent performance improvement (just how slow was it then ?), improves support for Ruby on Rails and for including Java classes in Ruby; delivers various design refactorings; and fixes some 86 Jira bugs. According to Thomas Enebo,
JRuby is going really well.
And Microsoft has just hired Ruby guru John Lam, to help it add dynamic scripting languages to the Common Language Runtime platform. Apparently, he created RubyCLR as an alternative to Microsoft’s C#, so this suggests that Microsoft could soon deliver Ruby as a complement to it’s release of IronPython (which is Python for .Net). There’s certainly a rich choice for dynamic programming enthusiasts these days.
The problem I have is that delivering systems fast is popular, until the business finds out:
- that what it gets doesn’t align with its requirements well,
- that the cost of development pales into insignificance besides the cost of support,
- there’s no traceability
Of course, better dynamic languages may help but they’re still not really the real issue, as far as I can see., For example, customers and employers are thinking about ITIL and IT governance).
The real issue is that there’s No Silver Bullet. It’s an important essay from way back in 1986, by Frederick P. Brooks (he of Mythical Man-Month) that has been repeatedly proven.
Programming consists of overcoming two things: accidental difficulties, things which are difficult because you happen to be using inadequate programming tools, and things which are difficult, which no programming tool or language is going to solve. An example of an accidental difficulty is manual memory management, e.g. “malloc” and “free,” or the singleton classes people create in Java because they don’t have top level functions. An example of something which is actually difficult is dealing with the subtle interactions between different parts of a program, for example, figuring out all the implications of a new feature that you just added.
Improvements in programming languages can eliminate accidental difficulties, but after you’ve done that, you’re left with the actual complexity of software development, so the No Silver Bullet theory basically warns us to expect diminishing returns from new technologies. I’m not really doing justice to Brooks’ argument, so if you haven’t read No Silver Bullet recently, I would highly recommend it.
Topics: Languages, People, Productivity, Work, blogs / podcasts | 2 Comments »
Cluetrain manifesto
By Martin English | October 24, 2006
The entire text of The Cluetrain Manifesto is now available online.
Topics: People, Productivity, blogs / podcasts | No Comments »
Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense
By Martin English | October 16, 2006
Heroic leaders are a disaster. Seventy per cent of mergers fail. In most organisations, financial incentives cause more problems than they solve. There is no connection between high executive pay and company performance (well, there is - the wider the pay differentials, the lower the commitment of the less well paid). The main result of many consultancy assignments is another consultancy assignment. All ’silver bullet’ or ‘big ideas’ on their own are wrong.
These are not theories, but facts. Yet companies trip over themselves to buy others, launch change initiatives, introduce pay for performance, flit from one big idea to the next - and pay their CEOs stratospherically. It’s hardly surprising so many go belly up. If doctors were as cavalier with the evidence, a lot of their patients would be dead and many medics would be behind bars.
Amazon link - no referrer code !!
Topics: People, Productivity, blogs / podcasts | No Comments »
Set up a personal, home SSH server
By Martin English | October 11, 2006
How to set up a personal, home SSH server
Why SSH?
- Unlike a home web server, SSH is read/write, meaning you can get and put files on a server with it.
- Unlike a home FTP server, SSH is secure. All the transactions are encrypted and cannot be sniffed.
- Unlike a VNC server, SSH alone doesnt let you drive your computer remotely, and it is also secure and encrypted while VNC is not.
Topics: Code, Productivity, Technology | No Comments »
Opensource CMS blogs e-commerce groupware Forums etc
By Martin English | October 7, 2006
www.opensourcecms.com is designed to give you the opportunity to “try out” some of the best php/mysql based free and open source software systems in the world.
The site provides an administrator username and password for every system which allows you to to add and delete content, change the way things look, basically be the admin of any system here without fear of breaking anything. Each system is deleted and re-installed every two hours.
At the upper left hand side of your screen you will see a clock that is counting down. What it shows is how much time is left in this two hour demo window. Once the clock hits 00:00:00, opensourceCMS.com will shut down and the demos are completely refreshed.