A couple of days ago, a buddy of mine, Scott Hanselman, wrote a nice little intro to the "dynamic" type in C# 4.0. In particular, I like (though don't necessarily 100% agree with) his one-sentence summation of dynamic as "There's no way for you or I to know the type of this now, compiler, so let's hope that the runtime figures it out." It's an interesting characterization, but my disagreement with his characterization is not the point here, at least not of this particular blog entry.

I've been waiting for it for a while, ever since C# 4 was announced, and sure enough, here we go: Scott's blog is the victim of the Static-Typing Fundamentalist, the bearded and grizzled veteran of the Static/Dynamic Code Wars, come out to proclaim the sins of dynamic programming, the evils of those who use(d) it, and why C#/C++/Java was so much better than Visual Basic/Ruby/Python/whatever. Be careful of these creatures. They rival Al-Qaeda in their ferocity and zeal, Fox News in their attention to detail and evidence, and George Bush in their pronouncements of gloom and doom for the future if we don't act now and eliminate this evil.

Allow me to quote (liberally) from Rob's comment on Scott's blog, and comment in turn as we go:

It's such a shame that you promote this stuff. You should've seen the horrific devastation that "Variant" caused in the old VB days. Variant single-handedly create job security for so many people since the late 90's, because of the horrible, horrible, horrible things that developers did with that ridiculous, 12-byte data type!

I just love it when people make comments like "horrific devastation". Nothing like a little hyperbole to liven things up! I mean, it didn't cause exceptions, it didn't make code hard to read, it didn't make it tricky for developers to modify and refactor safely, it leveled cities! burned forests! slaughtered kittens! and even worse, it was 12 bytes in size!

Never mind the fact that Visual Basic developers frequently churned out apps twice, three, five times faster than their C++ cousins did. (I know this—I was one of those C++ developers, and routinely mocked the VB guys across the hall for their crappy language and code.... until they built an app in a few days that I tried to build at home in C++ and gave up after two weeks. And all the damn thing did was basic dialogs-and-data kinds of stuff, too.)

This weak-typing with late-binding is just such a bad idea. I know you'll say "But wait, these are powerful tools that skilled developers can leverage!" - and maybe so, but 98% of the people that truly use these sorts of techniques out in the real world, are unskilled developers making a mess of software all across this great land, because the compiler is so forgiving.

Ah, the "All Developers (Except Me) Are Idiots" argument. I love this one—the hubris involved here is just too precious for words. I have no doubt that the author of this post, being (of course) the classically-trained object-oriented developer and therefore too smart/disciplined/experienced/whatever to fall into such a ridiculous temptation as to use dynamic typing, would never use this feature except in the Most Dire of Emergencies, but his fellow programmers, all of them being much less disciplined/smart/trained/whatever than he is, will fall for the temptation and write code that levels cities! burns forests! kills kittens! and worse, uses 12 bytes! (Oh, wait, it's only 3 bytes, because dynamic is just a placeholder for an object reference, and all object references are 3 bytes in the CLR. Or at least they used to be—I admit, I haven't checked in CLR 4.) Those poor souls, they won't have any hope! There they'll be, staring at Visual Studio, wanting desperately to do the Right Thing, and that evil little programmer devil on their shoulder (probably wearing a T-shirt that says, "P3rl is l33t" or something equally blasphemous) will whisper, "You know, if you just make it a dynamic, you can get the compiler to shut up and you can go home early...."

Oh, right—sorry, I forgot. That devil will whisper, "You know, if you write this code in Visual Basic .NET, you can make the entire codebase Option Strict Off and Option Explicit Off, make the compiler shut up and you can go home early...." Hell, they've been whispering that bit of subversion since 2001. And ye Gods! The leveled cities! burned forests! cute little kitten bodies! all over the place! It's fortunate that we C# developers have kept all those Visual Basic developers on the straight-and-narrow path of true salvation static typing.

This is a huge step backwards for C#, in my opinion - and creates the same scenario VB always did - where it is so forgiving, that it allows developers to write horrible code and you won't so much as see a compiler warning!! I've always tauted that C# was better, simply because it gave the developer "tough love", and forced him/her to be better coder and to "make good choices"!

Ah, yes, the C# compiler and its "tough love". The "prefer compile errors over runtime errors" argument, vis-a-vis Scott Meyers' "Effective C++" circa 1994 or so. It's vastly preferable to see errors early, before the big demo in front of the VP/President/potential customer. (Anybody who disagrees with this obviously hasn't had a demo fail in front of a VP/President/potential customer.) How fortunate that the C# compiler catches all these ugly errors at compile-time, like

   1: static void DoSomething()

   2: {

   3:     List<object> intList = new List<object>();

   4:     intList.Add(5);

   5:     string s = (string) intList[0];

   6:     Console.WriteLine(s);

   7: }

... because boy, that would be embarrassing if it didn't. I mean, can you imagine the horror other disciplined/smart/experienced developers would feel if a lenient compiler actually allowed code like this:

   1: class Point

   2: {

   3:     internal int x;

   4:     internal int y;

   5:     public Point(int x, int y)

   6:     {

   7:         x = x;

   8:         y = y;

   9:     }

  10: }

or this:

   1: class Point

   2: {

   3:     internal int x;

   4:     internal int y;

   5:     public Point(int x, int y)

   6:     {

   7:         this.x = x;

   8:         this.y = y;

   9:     }

  10:     public override string ToString()

  11:     {

  12:         return String.Format("({0},{1})", x, y);

  13:     }

  14: }

  15: static void DoSomething()

  16: {

  17:     Point pt = new Point(12, 12);

  18:     pt.GetType()

  19:         .GetField("x", BindingFlags.Instance | 

  20:             BindingFlags.NonPublic)

  21:         .SetValue(pt, 24);

  22:     Console.WriteLine(pt);

  23: }

to compile? Cities! Forests! Kittens! Thank God C# isn't that kind of lustfully promiscuous... I mean, "lenient"... compiler!

(Now if only we could tout blog comment engines with spellcheck....)

Specific to this blog post, if you are doing somewhere where you can't even quantify what the data type that is coming back? Guess waht, you've got yourself a bad design.

Wow. There's just no arguing with that one. I mean, knowing the actual type on which the method is being dispatched is such a huge part of the C# development experience:

   1: static void DoSomething()

   2: {

   3:     List<Point> ptList = new List<Point>();

   4:     ptList.Add(new Point(12, 12));

   5:     object o = ptList[0];

   6:     Console.WriteLine(o.ToString());

   7: }

Gah. Just the thought of not knowing the concrete type on which the method is being dispatched gives me the heebie-jeebies.

Just because the framework allows you use weak-typing and late-binding, doesn't mean you should - nor should you endorse it's use, in my opinion.

Somebody better tell all those users of NHibernate, NUnit, Spring.NET, MEF and all those other Reflection-based tools... including WinForms, ASP.NET, WPF, Workflow and WCF, come to think about it... that they're using frameworks that clearly were designed by idiots. (The gall of those people.)

I'm just saying, it's a shame that popular "nerd celebrities" like you (and I mean zero offense by that!) - endorse all this loosey-goosey typing. I say that becuase I've never seen a single case where weak typing or late binding: A) made a design better or B) where it didn't make the component or application worse, because it was a looser design.

I'm so glad you were here to set Scott and me straight, Rob. Because otherwise, we might actually get something done. God forbid.

Little tidbits of thought for those who are still thinking about this one.

• Ola Bini describes the application of the right language at the right level of the stack as a three-layer pyramid.
• Any C# or Java developer who's not writing unit tests to test their code "because the compiler will catch all those errors" and provide "tough love" needs to be fired. Immediately. I cannot conceive of a situation where unit tests can be passed over in favor of static typing in a professionally-responsible development project. (Oh, don't mis-read that, I can see lots of situations where unit tests aren't necessary. But not on code that's going to reach Production.)
• The argument for the degree of static typing in C# or Java is completely indefensible compared to what statically-typed type-inferenced languages like Haskell, F# or Scala provide. And their syntax frequently looks like "let x = [ 1; 2; 3; 4; ]", which isn't all that far off from what a dynamically-typed language looks like, despite very very different things happening under the compiler's hood. Until you, the Statically-Typed Fundamentalist, have written code in a Haskell/ML-derived language, you have no right arguing the merits of static typing. (In fact, that's probably also true if you've never written code in Ruby, Python, or PowerShell, either.)
• There's lots more arguments the Static-Typing Fundamentalist can throw, by the way. I'm disappointed Rob never mentioned performance, for one—that's a classic line of attack, too. Never mind the fact that most of those guys are still looping down and doing other silly micro-optimizations because that's way C++ taught them to do it....
• Oh, and never ever show the Static Typing Fundamentalist an XML document and using something like XPath to extract data from it. They inevitably fall into XML Schema and the "if we just write the schema flexibly enough" and.... The last time I did that.... I still visit his gravesite, all these years later, and it still hurts, losing him that way.
• Java guys argued against dynamic typing for years, too... until they tried Groovy and JRuby and Clojure. Now.... not so much.

Peace out.

Cruising the Web late last night, I ran across "10 things you can do to advance your career as a developer", summarized below:

1. Build a PC
2. Participate in an online forum and help others
3. Man the help desk
4. Perform field service
5. Perform DBA functions
6. Perform all phases of the project lifecycle
7. Recognize and learn the latest technologies
8. Be an independent contractor
9. Lead a project, supervise, or manage
10. Seek additional education

I agreed with some of them, I disagreed with others, and in general felt like they were a little too high-level to be of real use. For example, "Seek additional education" seems entirely too vague: In what? How much? How often? And "Recognize and learn the latest technologies" is something like offering advice to the Olympic fencing silver medalist and saying, "You should have tried harder".

So, in the great spirit of "Not Invented Here", I present my own list; as usual, I welcome comment and argument. And, also as usual, caveats apply, since not everybody will be in precisely the same place and be looking for the same things. In general, though, whether you're looking to kick-start your career or just "kick it up a notch", I believe this list will help, because these ideas have been of help to me at some point or another in my own career.

10: Build a PC.

Yes, even developers have to know about hardware. More importantly, a developer at a small organization or team will find himself in a position where he has to take on some system administrator roles, and sometimes that means grabbing a screwdriver, getting a little dusty and dirty, and swapping hardware around. Having said this, though, once you've done it once or twice, leave it alone—the hardware game is an ever-shifting and ever-changing game (much like software is, surprise surprise), and it's been my experience that most of us only really have the time to pursue one or the other.

By the way, "PC" there is something of a generic term—build a Linux box, build a Windows box, or "build" a Mac OS box (meaning, buy a Mac Pro and trick it out a little—add more memory, add another hard drive, and so on), they all get you comfortable with snapping parts together, and discovering just how ridiculously simple the whole thing really is.

And for the record, once you've done it, go ahead and go back to buying pre-built systems or laptops—I've never found building a PC to be any cheaper than buying one pre-built. Particularly for PC systems, I prefer to use smaller local vendors where I can customize and trick out the box. If you're a Mac, that's not really an option unless you're into the "Hackintosh" thing, which is quite possibly the logical equivalent to "Build a PC". Having never done it myself, though, I can't say how useful that is as an educational action.

9: Pick a destination

Do you want to run a team of your own? Become an independent contractor? Teach programming classes? Speak at conferences? Move up into higher management and get out of the programming game altogether? Everybody's got a different idea of what they consider to be the "ideal" career, but it's amazing how many people don't really think about what they want their career path to be.

A wise man once said, "The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." I disagree: The journey of a thousand miles begins with the damn map. You have to know where you want to go, and a rough idea of how to get there, before you can really start with that single step. Otherwise, you're just wandering, which in itself isn't a bad thing, but isn't going to get you to a destination except by random chance. (Sometimes that's not a bad result, but at least then you're openly admitting that you're leaving your career in the hands of chance. If you're OK with that, skip to the next item. If you're not, read on.)

Lay out explicitly (as in, write it down someplace) what kind of job you're wanting to grow into, and then lay out a couple of scenarios that move you closer towards that goal. Can you grow within the company you're in? (Have others been able to?) Do you need to quit and strike out on your own? Do you want to lead a team of your own? (Are there new projects coming in to the company that you could put yourself forward as a potential tech lead?) And so on.

Once you've identified the destination, now you can start thinking about steps to get there.

If you want to become a speaker, put your name forward to give some presentations at the local technology user group, or volunteer to hold a "brown bag" session at the company. Sign up with Toastmasters to hone your speaking technique. Watch other speakers give technical talks, and see what they do that you don't, and vice versa.

If you want to be a tech lead, start by quietly assisting other members of the team get their work done. Help them debug thorny problems. Answer questions they have. Offer yourself up as a resource for dealing with hard problems.

If you want to slowly move up the management chain, look to get into the project management side of things. Offer to be a point of contact for the users. Learn the business better. Sit down next to one of your users and watch their interaction with the existing software, and try to see the system from their point of view.

And so on.

8: Be a bell curve

Frequently, at conferences, attendees ask me how I got to know so much on so many things. In some ways, I'm reminded of the story of a world-famous concert pianist giving a concert at Carnegie Hall—when a gushing fan said, "I'd give my life to be able to play like that", the pianist responded quietly, "I did". But as much as I'd like to leave you with the impression that I've dedicated my entire life to knowing everything I could about this industry, that would be something of a lie. The truth is, I don't know anywhere near as much as I'd like, and I'm always poking my head into new areas. Thank God for my ADD, that's all I can say on that one.

For the rest of you, though, that's not feasible, and not really practical, particularly since I have an advantage that the "working" programmer doesn't—I have set aside weeks or months in which to do nothing more than study a new technology or language.

Back in the early days of my career, though, when I was holding down the 9-to-5, I was a Windows/C++ programmer. I was working with the Borland C++ compiler and its associated framework, the ObjectWindows Library (OWL), extending and maintaining applications written in it. One contracting client wanted me to work with Microsoft MFC instead of OWL. Another one was storing data into a relational database using ODBC. And so on. Slowly, over time, I built up a "bell curve"-looking collection of skills that sort of "hovered" around the central position of C++/Windows.

Then, one day, a buddy of mine mentioned the team on which he was a project manager was looking for new blood. They were doing web applications, something with which I had zero experience—this was completely outside of my bell curve. HTML, HTTP, Cold Fusion, NetDynamics (an early Java app server), this was way out of my range, though at least NetDynamics was a little similar, since it was basically a server-side application framework, and I had some experience with app frameworks from my C++ days. So, resting on my C++ experience, I started flirting with Java, and so on.

Before long, my "bell curve" had been readjusted to have Java more or less at its center, and I found that experience in C++ still worked out here—what I knew about ODBC turned out to be incredibly useful in understanding JDBC, what I knew about DLLs from Windows turned out to be helpful in understanding Java's dynamic loading model, and of course syntactically Java looked a lot like C++ even though it behaved a little bit differently under the hood. (One article author suggested that Java was closer to Smalltalk than C++, and that prompted me to briefly flirt with Smalltalk before I concluded said author was out of his frakking mind.)

All of this happened over roughly a three-year period, by the way.

The point here is that you won't be able to assimilate the entire industry in a single sitting, so pick something that's relatively close to what you already know, and use your experience as a springboard to learn something that's new, yet possibly-if-not-probably useful to your current job. You don't have to be a deep expert in it, and the further away it is from what you do, the less you really need to know about it (hence the bell curve metaphor), but you're still exposing yourself to new ideas and new concepts and new tools/technologies that still could be applicable to what you do on a daily basis. Over time the "center" of your bell curve may drift away from what you've done to include new things, and that's OK.

7: Learn one new thing every year

In the last tip, I told you to branch out slowly from what you know. In this tip, I'm telling you to go throw a dart at something entirely unfamiliar to you and learn it. Yes, I realize this sounds contradictory. It's because those who stick to only what they know end up missing the radical shifts of direction that the industry hits every half-decade or so until it's mainstream and commonplace and "everybody's doing it".

In their amazing book "The Pragmatic Programmer", Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt suggest that you learn one new programming language every year. I'm going to amend that somewhat—not because there aren't enough languages in the world to keep you on that pace for the rest of your life—far from it, if that's what you want, go learn Ruby, F#, Scala, Groovy, Clojure, Icon, Io, Erlang, Haskell and Smalltalk, then come back to me for the list for 2020—but because languages aren't the only thing that we as developers need to explore. There's a lot of movement going on in areas beyond languages, and you don't want to be the last kid on the block to know they're happening.

Consider this list: object databases (db4o) and/or the "NoSQL" movement (MongoDB). Dependency injection and composable architectures (Spring, MEF). A dynamic language (Ruby, Python, ECMAScript). A functional language (F#, Scala, Haskell). A Lisp (Common Lisp, Clojure, Scheme, Nu). A mobile platform (iPhone, Android). "Space"-based architecture (Gigaspaces, Terracotta). Rich UI platforms (Flash/Flex, Silverlight). Browser enhancements (AJAX, jQuery, HTML 5) and how they're different from the rich UI platforms. And this is without adding any of the "obvious" stuff, like Cloud, to the list.

(I'm not convinced Cloud is something worth learning this year, anyway.)

You get through that list, you're operating outside of your comfort zone, and chances are, your boss' comfort zone, which puts you into the enviable position of being somebody who can advise him around those technologies. DO NOT TAKE THIS TO MEAN YOU MUST KNOW THEM DEEPLY. Just having a passing familiarity with them can be enough. DO NOT TAKE THIS TO MEAN YOU SHOULD PROPOSE USING THEM ON THE NEXT PROJECT. In fact, sometimes the most compelling evidence that you really know where and when they should be used is when you suggest stealing ideas from the thing, rather than trying to force-fit the thing onto the project as a whole.

6: Practice, practice, practice

Speaking of the concert pianist, somebody once asked him how to get to Carnegie Hall. HIs answer: "Practice, my boy, practice."

The same is true here. You're not going to get to be a better developer without practice. Volunteer some time—even if it's just an hour a week—on an open-source project, or start one of your own. Heck, it doesn't even have to be an "open source" project—just create some requirements of your own, solve a problem that a family member is having, or rewrite the project you're on as an interesting side-project. Do the Nike thing and "Just do it". Write some Scala code. Write some F# code. Once you're past "hello world", write the Scala code to use db4o as a persistent storage. Wire it up behind Tapestry. Or write straight servlets in Scala. And so on.

5: Turn off the TV

Speaking of marketing slogans, if you're like most Americans, surveys have shown that you watch about four hours of TV a day, or 28 hours of TV a week. In that same amount of time (28 hours over 1 week), you could read the entire set of poems by Maya Angelou, one F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, all poems by T.S.Eliot, 2 plays by Thornton Wilder, or all 150 Psalms of the Bible. An average reader, reading just one hour a day, can finish an "average-sized" book (let's assume about the size of a novel) in a week, which translates to 52 books a year.

Let's assume a technical book is going to take slightly longer, since it's a bit deeper in concept and requires you to spend some time experimenting and typing in code; let's assume that reading and going through the exercises of an average technical book will require 4 weeks (a month) instead of just one week. That's 12 new tools/languages/frameworks/ideas you'd be learning per year.

All because you stopped watching David Caruso turn to the camera, whip his sunglasses off and say something stupid. (I guess it's not his fault; CSI:Miami is a crap show. The other two are actually not bad, but Miami just makes me retch.)

After all, when's the last time that David Caruso or the rest of that show did anything that was even remotely realistic from a computer perspective? (I always laugh out loud every time they run a database search against some national database on a completely non-indexable criteria—like a partial license plate number—and it comes back in seconds. What the hell database are THEY using? I want it!) Soon as you hear The Who break into that riff, flip off the TV (or set it to mute) and pick up the book on the nightstand and boost your career. (And hopefully sink Caruso's.)

Or, if you just can't give up your weekly dose of Caruso, then put the book in the bathroom. Think about it—how much time do you spend in there a week?

And this gets even better when you get a Kindle or other e-reader that accepts PDFs, or the book you're interested in is natively supported in the e-readers' format. Now you have it with you for lunch, waiting at dinner for your food to arrive, or while you're sitting guard on your 10-year-old so he doesn't sneak out of his room after his bedtime to play more XBox.

4: Have a life

Speaking of XBox, don't slave your life to work. Pursue other things. Scientists have repeatedly discovered that exercise helps keep the mind in shape, so take a couple of hours a week (buh-bye, American Idol) and go get some exercise. Pick up a new sport you've never played before, or just go work out at the gym. (This year I'm doing Hopkido and fencing.) Read some nontechnical books. (I recommend anything by Malcolm Gladwell as a starting point.) Spend time with your family, if you have one—mine spends at least six or seven hours a week playing "family games" like Settlers of Catan, Dominion, To Court The King, Munchkin, and other non-traditional games, usually over lunch or dinner. I also belong to an informal "Game Night club" in Redmond consisting of several Microsoft employees and their families, as well as outsiders. And so on. Heck, go to a local bar and watch the game, and you'll meet some really interesting people. And some boring people, too, but you don't have to talk to them during the next game if you don't want.

This isn't just about maintaining a healthy work-life balance—it's also about having interests that other people can latch on to, qualities that will make you more "human" and more interesting as a person, and make you more attractive and "connectable" and stand out better in their mind when they hear that somebody they know is looking for a software developer. This will also help you connect better with your users, because like it or not, they do not get your puns involving Klingon. (Besides, the geek stereotype is SO 90's, and it's time we let the world know that.)

Besides, you never know when having some depth in other areas—philosophy, music, art, physics, sports, whatever—will help you create an analogy that will explain some thorny computer science concept to a non-technical person and get past a communication roadblock.

3: Practice on a cadaver

Long before they scrub up for their first surgery on a human, medical students practice on dead bodies. It's grisly, it's not something we really want to think about, but when you're the one going under the general anesthesia, would you rather see the surgeon flipping through the "How-To" manual, "just to refresh himself"?

Diagnosing and debugging a software system can be a hugely puzzling trial, largely because there are so many possible "moving parts" that are creating the problem. Compound that with certain bugs that only appear when multiple users are interacting at the same time, and you've got a recipe for disaster when a production bug suddenly threatens to jeopardize the company's online revenue stream. Do you really want to be sitting in the production center, flipping through "How-To"'s and FAQs online while your boss looks on and your CEO is counting every minute by the thousands of dollars?

Take a tip from the med student: long before the thing goes into production, introduce a bug, deploy the code into a virtual machine, then hand it over to a buddy and let him try to track it down. Have him do the same for you. Or if you can't find a buddy to help you, do it to yourself (but try not to cheat or let your knowledge of where the bug is color your reactions). How do you know the bug is there? Once you know it's there, how do you determine what kind of bug it is? Where do you start looking for it? How would you track it down without attaching a debugger or otherwise disrupting the system's operations? (Remember, we can't always just attach an IDE and step through the code on a production server.) How do you patch the running system? And so on.

Remember, you can either learn these things under controlled circumstances, learn them while you're in the "hot seat", so to speak, or not learn them at all and see how long the company keeps you around.

2: Administer the system

Take off your developer hat for a while—a week, a month, a quarter, whatever—and be one of those thankless folks who have to keep the system running. Wear the pager that goes off at 3AM when a server goes down. Stay all night doing one of those "server upgrades" that have to be done in the middle of the night because the system can't be upgraded while users are using it. Answer the phones or chat requests of those hapless users who can't figure out why they can't find the record they just entered into the system, and after a half-hour of thinking it must be a bug, ask them if they remembered to check the "Save this record" checkbox on the UI (which had to be there because the developers were told it had to be there) before submitting the form. Try adding a user. Try removing a user. Try changing the user's password. Learn what a real joy having seven different properties/XML/configuration files scattered all over the system really is.

Once you've done that, particularly on a system that you built and tossed over the fence into production and thought that was the end of it, you'll understand just why it's so important to keep the system administrators in mind when you're building a system for production. And why it's critical to be able to have a system that tells you when it's down, instead of having to go hunting up the answer when a VP tells you it is (usually because he's just gotten an outage message from a customer or client).

1: Cultivate a peer group

Yes, you can join an online forum, ask questions, answer questions, and learn that way, but that's a poor substitute for physical human contact once in a while. Like it or not, various sociological and psychological studies confirm that a "connection" is really still best made when eyeballs meet flesh. (The "disassociative" nature of email is what makes it so easy to be rude or flamboyant or downright violent in email when we would never say such things in person.) Go to conferences, join a user group, even start one of your own if you can't find one. Yes, the online avenues are still open to you—read blogs, join mailing lists or newsgroups—but don't lose sight of human-to-human contact.

While we're at it, don't create a peer group of people that all look to you for answers—as flattering as that feels, and as much as we do learn by providing answers, frequently we rise (or fall) to the level of our peers—have at least one peer group that's overwhelmingly smarter than you, and as scary as it might be, venture to offer an answer or two to that group when a question comes up. You don't have to be right—in fact, it's often vastly more educational to be wrong. Just maintain an attitude that says "I have no ego wrapped up in being right or wrong", and take the entire experience as a learning opportunity.

I'm excited to say that TechEd has accepted my pre-conference proposal, Multiparadigmatic C#, where the abstract reads:

C# has grown from “just” an object-oriented language into a language that is capable of expressing several different paradigms of software development: object-oriented, functional, and dynamic. In this session, developers will learn how to approach programming in C# to use each of these approaches, and when.

If you're interested in seeing C# used in a variety of different ways, come on out.

And if you're not going to TechEd.... why not? It's in New Orleans, folks!

But too impatient to read a whole book on it? Try the 6-panel RefCard that Chance Coble and I put together for DZone. Free download.

Or, for the more patient type, wait for the books that Chance and I (Professional F#) are each writing; they're remarkably complementary, at least from what Chance has told me about his.

Which reminds me.... if you've not already noticed, Pro F# is now up in Amazon. Call me a romantic fool, but I get just a little thrill run down my spine every time a new book of mine shows up on Amazon, and just a slightly bigger one when it shows up on a shelf (which will happen shortly after VS 2010 hits the streets). Nothing like that little surge of energy to give you the boost you need to cross the finish line.

Here we go again—another year, another set of predictions revisited and offered up for the next 12 months. And maybe, if I'm feeling really ambitious, I'll take that shot I thought about last year and try predicting for the decade. Without further ado, I'll go back and revisit, unedited, my predictions for 2009 ("THEN"), and pontificate on those subjects for 2010 before adding any new material/topics. Just for convenience, here's a link back to last years' predictions.

Last year's predictions went something like this (complete with basketball-scoring):

• THEN: "Cloud" will become the next "ESB" or "SOA", in that it will be something that everybody will talk about, but few will understand and even fewer will do anything with. (Considering the widespread disparity in the definition of the term, this seems like a no-brainer.) NOW: Oh, yeah. Straight up. I get two points for this one. Does anyone have a working definition of "cloud" that applies to all of the major vendors' implementations? Ted, 2; Wrongness, 0.
• THEN: Interest in Scala will continue to rise, as will the number of detractors who point out that Scala is too hard to learn. NOW: Two points for this one, too. Not a hard one, mind you, but one of those "pass-and-shoot" jumpers from twelve feet out. James Strachan even tweeted about this earlier today, pointing out this comparison. As more Java developers who think of themselves as smart people try to pick up Scala and fail, the numbers of sour grapes responses like "Scala's too complex, and who needs that functional stuff anyway?" will continue to rise in 2010. Ted, 4; Wrongness, 0.
• THEN: Interest in F# will continue to rise, as will the number of detractors who point out that F# is too hard to learn. (Hey, the two really are cousins, and the fortunes of one will serve as a pretty good indication of the fortunes of the other, and both really seem to be on the same arc right now.) NOW: Interestingly enough, I haven't heard as many F# detractors as Scala detractors, possibly because I think F# hasn't really reached the masses of .NET developers the way that Scala has managed to find its way in front of Java developers. I think that'll change mighty quickly in 2010, though, once VS 2010 hits the streets. Ted, 4; Wrongness 2.
• THEN: Interest in all kinds of functional languages will continue to rise, and more than one person will take a hint from Bob "crazybob" Lee and liken functional programming to AOP, for good and for ill. People who took classes on Haskell in college will find themselves reaching for their old college textbooks again. NOW: Yep, I'm claiming two points on this one, if only because a bunch of Haskell books shipped this year, and they'll be the last to do so for about five years after this. (By the way, does anybody still remember aspects?) But I'm going the opposite way with this one now; yes, there's Haskell, and yes, there's Erlang, and yes, there's a lot of other functional languages out there, but who cares? They're hard to learn, they don't always translate well to other languages, and developers want languages that work on the platform they use on a daily basis, and that means F# and Scala or Clojure, or its simply not an option. Ted 6; Wrongness 2.
• THEN: The iPhone is going to be hailed as "the enterprise development platform of the future", and companies will be rolling out apps to it. Look for Quicken iPhone edition, PowerPoint and/or Keynote iPhone edition, along with connectors to hook the iPhone up to a presentation device, and (I'll bet) a World of Warcraft iPhone client (legit or otherwise). iPhone is the new hotness in the mobile space, and people will flock to it madly. NOW: Two more points, but let's be honest—this was a fast-break layup, no work required on my part. Ted 8; Wrongness 2.
• THEN: Another Oslo CTP will come out, and it will bear only a superficial resemblance to the one that came out in October at PDC. Betting on Oslo right now is a fools' bet, not because of any inherent weakness in the technology, but just because it's way too early in the cycle to be thinking about for anything vaguely resembling production code. NOW: If you've worked at all with Oslo, you might argue with me, but I'm still taking my two points. The two CTPs were pretty different in a number of ways. Ted 10; Wrongness 2.
• THEN: The IronPython and IronRuby teams will find some serious versioning issues as they try to manage the DLR versioning story between themselves and the CLR as a whole. An initial hack will result, which will be codified into a standard practice when .NET 4.0 ships. Then the next release of IPy or IRb will have to try and slip around its restrictions in 2010/2011. By 2012, IPy and IRb will have to be shipping as part of Visual Studio just to put the releases back into lockstep with one another (and the rest of the .NET universe). NOW: Pressure is still building. Let's see what happens by the time VS 2010 ships, and then see what the IPy/IRb teams start to do to adjust to the versioning issues that arise. Ted 8; Wrongness 2.
• THEN: The death of JSR-277 will spark an uprising among the two leading groups hoping to foist it off on the Java community--OSGi and Maven--while the rest of the Java world will breathe a huge sigh of relief and look to see what "modularity" means in Java 7. Some of the alpha geeks in Java will start using--if not building--JDK 7 builds just to get a heads-up on its impact, and be quietly surprised and, I dare say, perhaps even pleased. NOW: Ah, Ted, you really should never underestimate the community's willingness to take a bad idea, strip all the goodness out of it, and then cycle it back into the mix as something completely different yet somehow just as dangerous and crazy. I give you Project Jigsaw. Ted 10; Wrongness 2;
• THEN: The invokedynamic JSR will leapfrog in importance to the top of the list. NOW: The invokedynamic JSR begat interest in other languages on the JVM. The interest in other languages on the JVM begat the need to start thinking about how to support them in the Java libraries. The need to start thinking about supporting those languages begat a "Holy sh*t moment" somewhere inside Sun and led them to (re-)propose closures for JDK 7. And in local sports news, Ted notched up two more points on the scoreboard. Ted 12; Wrongness 2.
• THEN: Another Windows 7 CTP will come out, and it will spawn huge media interest that will eventually be remembered as Microsoft promises, that will eventually be remembered as Microsoft guarantees, that will eventually be remembered as Microsoft FUD and "promising much, delivering little". Microsoft ain't always at fault for the inflated expectations people have--sometimes, yes, perhaps even a lot of times, but not always. NOW: And then, just when the game started to turn into a runaway, airballs started to fly. The Windows7 release shipped, and contrary to what I expected, the general response to it was pretty warm. Yes, there were a few issues that emerged, but overall the media liked it, the masses liked it, and Microsoft seemed to have dodged a bullet. Ted 12; Wrongness 5.
• THEN: Apple will begin to legally threaten the clone market again, except this time somebody's going to get the DOJ involved. (Yes, this is the iPhone/iTunes prediction from last year, carrying over. I still expect this to happen.) NOW: What clones? The only people trying to clone Macs are those who are building Hackintosh machines, and Apple can't sue them so long as they're using licensed copies of Mac OS X (as far as I know). Which has never stopped them from trying, mind you, and I still think Steve has some part of his brain whispering to him at night, calculating all the hardware sales lost to Hackintosh netbooks out there. But in any event, that's another shot missed. Ted 12; Wrongness 7.
• THEN: Alpha-geek developers will start creating their own languages (even if they're obscure or bizarre ones like Shakespeare or Ook#) just to have that listed on their resume as the DSL/custom language buzz continues to build. NOW: I give you Ioke. If I'd extended this to include outdated CPU interpreters, I'd have made that three-pointer from half-court instead of just the top of the key. Ted 14; Wrongness 7.
• THEN: Roy Fielding will officially disown most of the "REST"ful authors and software packages available. Nobody will care--or worse, somebody looking to make a name for themselves will proclaim that Roy "doesn't really understand REST". And they'll be right--Roy doesn't understand what they consider to be REST, and the fact that he created the term will be of no importance anymore. Being "REST"ful will equate to "I did it myself!", complete with expectations of a gold star and a lollipop. NOW: Does anybody in the REST community care what Roy Fielding wrote way back when? I keep seeing "REST"ful systems that seem to have designers who've never heard of Roy, or his thesis. Roy hasn't officially disowned them, but damn if he doesn't seem close to it. Still.... No points. Ted 14; Wrongness 9.
• THEN: The Parrot guys will make at least one more minor point release. Nobody will notice or care, except for a few doggedly stubborn Perl hackers. They will find themselves having nightmares of previous lives carrying around OS/2 books and Amiga paraphernalia. Perl 6 will celebrate it's seventh... or is it eighth?... anniversary of being announced, and nobody will notice. NOW: Does anybody still follow Perl 6 development? Has the spec even been written yet? Google on "Perl 6 release", and you get varying reports: "It'll ship 'when it's ready'", "There are no such dates because this isn't a commericially-backed effort", and "Spring 2010". Swish—nothin' but net. Ted 16; Wrongness 9.
• THEN: The debate around "Scrum Certification" will rise to a fever pitch as short-sighted money-tight companies start looking for reasons to cut costs and either buy into agile at a superficial level and watch it fail, or start looking to cut the agilists from their company in order to replace them with cheaper labor. NOW: Agile has become another adjective meaning "best practices", and as such, has essentially lost its meaning. Just ask Scott Bellware. Ted 18; Wrongness 9.
• THEN: Adobe will continue to make Flex and AIR look more like C# and the CLR even as Microsoft tries to make Silverlight look more like Flash and AIR. Web designers will now get to experience the same fun that back-end web developers have enjoyed for near-on a decade, as shops begin to artificially partition themselves up as either "Flash" shops or "Silverlight" shops. NOW: Not sure how to score this one—I haven't seen the explicit partitioning happen yet, but the two environments definitely still seem to be looking to start tromping on each others' turf, particularly when we look at the rapid releases coming from the Silverlight team. Ted 16; Wrongness 11.
• THEN: Gartner will still come knocking, looking to hire me for outrageous sums of money to do nothing but blog and wax prophetic. NOW: Still no job offers. Damn. Ah, well. Ted 16; Wrongness 13.

A close game. Could've gone either way. *shrug* Ah, well. It was silly to try and score it in basketball metaphor, anyway—that's the last time I watch ESPN before writing this.

For 2010, I predict....

• ... I will offer 3- and 4-day training classes on F# and Scala, among other things. OK, that's not fair—yes, I have the materials, I just need to work out locations and times. Contact me if you're interested in a private class, by the way.
• ... I will publish two books, one on F# and one on Scala. OK, OK, another plug. Or, rather, more of a resolution. One will be the "Professional F#" I'm doing for Wiley/Wrox, the other isn't yet finalized. But it'll either be published through a publisher, or self-published, by JavaOne 2010.
• ... DSLs will either "succeed" this year, or begin the short slide into the dustbin of obscure programming ideas. Domain-specific language advocates have to put up some kind of strawman for developers to learn from and poke at, or the whole concept will just fade away. Martin's book will help, if it ships this year, but even that might not be enough to generate interest if it doesn't have some kind of large-scale applicability in it. Patterns and refactoring and enterprise containers all had a huge advantage in that developers could see pretty easily what the problem was they solved; DSLs haven't made that clear yet.
• ... functional languages will start to see a backlash. I hate to say it, but "getting" the functional mindset is hard, and there's precious few resources that are making it easy for mainstream (read: O-O) developers make that adjustment, far fewer than there was during the procedural-to-object shift. If the functional community doesn't want to become mainstream, then mainstream developers will find ways to take functional's most compelling gateway use-case (parallel/concurrent programming) and find a way to "git 'er done" in the traditional O-O approach, probably through software transactional memory, and functional languages like Haskell and Erlang will be relegated to the "What Might Have Been" of computer science history. Not sure what I mean? Try this: walk into a functional language forum, and ask what a monad is. Nobody yet has been able to produce an answer that doesn't involve math theory, or that does involve a practical domain-object-based example. In fact, nobody has really said why (or if) monads are even still useful. Or catamorphisms. Or any of the other dime-store words that the functional community likes to toss around.
• ... Visual Studio 2010 will ship on time, and be one of the buggiest and/or slowest releases in its history. I hate to make this prediction, because I really don't want to be right, but there's just so much happening in the Visual Studio refactoring effort that it makes me incredibly nervous. Widespread adoption of VS2010 will wait until SP1 at the earliest. In fact....
• ... Visual Studio 2010 SP 1 will ship within three months of the final product. Microsoft knows that people wait until SP 1 to think about upgrading, so they'll just plan for an eager SP 1 release, and hope that managers will be too hung over from the New Year (still) to notice that the necessary shakeout time hasn't happened.
• ... Apple will ship a tablet with multi-touch on it, and it will flop horribly. Not sure why I think this, but I just don't think the multi-touch paradigm that Apple has cooked up for the iPhone will carry over to a tablet/laptop device. That won't stop them from shipping it, and it won't stop Apple fan-boiz from buying it, but that's about where the interest will end.
• ... JDK 7 closures will be debated for a few weeks, then become a fait accompli as the Java community shrugs its collective shoulders. Frankly, I think the Java community has exhausted its interest in debating new language features for Java. Recent college grads and open-source groups with an axe to grind will continue to try and make an issue out of this, but I think the overall Java community just... doesn't... care. They just want to see JDK 7 ship someday.
• ... Scala either "pops" in 2010, or begins to fall apart. By "pops", I mean reaches a critical mass of developers interested in using it, enough to convince somebody to create a company around it, a la G2One.
• ... Oracle is going to make a serious "cloud" play, probably by offering an Oracle-hosted version of Azure or AppEngine. Oracle loves the enterprise space too much, and derives too much money from it, to not at least appear to have some kind of offering here. Now that they own Java, they'll marry it up against OpenSolaris, the Oracle database, and throw the whole thing into a series of server centers all over the continent, and call it "Oracle 12c" (c for Cloud, of course) or something.
• ... Spring development will slow to a crawl and start to take a left turn toward cloud ideas. VMWare bought SpringSource for a reason, and I believe it's entirely centered around VMWare's movement into the cloud space—they want to be more than "just" a virtualization tool. Spring + Groovy makes a compelling development stack, particularly if VMWare does some interesting hooks-n-hacks to make Spring a virtualization environment in its own right somehow. But from a practical perspective, any community-driven development against Spring is all but basically dead. The source may be downloadable later, like the VMWare Player code is, but making contributions back? Fuhgeddabowdit.
• ... the explosion of e-book readers brings the Kindle 2009 edition way down to size. The era of the e-book reader is here, and honestly, while I'm glad I have a Kindle, I'm expecting that I'll be dusting it off a shelf in a few years. Kinda like I do with my iPods from a few years ago.
• ... "social networking" becomes the "Web 2.0" of 2010. In other words, using the term will basically identify you as a tech wannabe and clearly out of touch with the bleeding edge.
• ... Facebook becomes a developer platform requirement. I don't pretend to know anything about Facebook—I'm not even on it, which amazes my family to no end—but clearly Facebook is one of those mechanisms by which people reach each other, and before long, it'll start showing up as a developer requirement for companies looking to hire. If you're looking to build out your resume to make yourself attractive to companies in 2010, mad Facebook skillz might not be a bad investment.
• ... Nintendo releases an open SDK for building games for its next-gen DS-based device. With the spectacular success of games on the iPhone, Nintendo clearly must see that they're missing a huge opportunity every day developers can't write games for the Nintendo DS that are easily downloadable to the device for playing. Nintendo is not stupid—if they don't open up the SDK and promote "casual" games like those on the iPhone and those that can now be downloaded to the Zune or the XBox, they risk being marginalized out of existence.

And for the next decade, I predict....

• ... colleges and unversities will begin issuing e-book reader devices to students. It's a helluvalot cheaper than issuing laptops or netbooks, and besides....
• ... netbooks and e-book readers will merge before the decade is out. Let's be honest—if the e-book reader could do email and browse the web, you have almost the perfect paperback-sized mobile device. As for the credit-card sized mobile device....
• ... mobile phones will all but disappear as they turn into what PDAs tried to be. "The iPhone makes calls? Really? You mean Voice-over-IP, right? No, wait, over cell signal? It can do that? Wow, there's really an app for everything, isn't there?"
• ... wireless formats will skyrocket in importance all around the office and home. Combine the iPhone's Bluetooth (or something similar yet lower-power-consuming) with an equally-capable (Bluetooth or otherwise) projector, and suddenly many executives can leave their netbook or laptop at home for a business presentation. Throw in the Whispersync-aware e-book reader/netbook-thing, and now most executives have absolutely zero reason to carry anything but their e-book/netbook and their phone/PDA. The day somebody figures out an easy way to combine Bluetooth with PayPal on the iPhone or Android phone, we will have more or less made pocket change irrelevant. And believe me, that day will happen before the end of the decade.
• ... either Android or Windows Mobile will gain some serious market share against the iPhone the day they figure out how to support an open and unrestricted AppStore-like app acquisition model. Let's be honest, the attraction of iTunes and AppStore is that I can see an "Oh, cool!" app on a buddy's iPhone, and have it on mine less than 30 seconds later. If Android or WinMo can figure out how to offer that same kind of experience without the draconian AppStore policies to go with it, they'll start making up lost ground on iPhone in a hurry.
• ... Apple becomes the DOJ target of the decade. Microsoft was it in the 2000's, and Apple's stunning rising success is going to put it squarely in the sights of monopolist accusations before long. Coupled with the unfortunate health distractions that Steve Jobs has to deal with, Apple's going to get hammered pretty hard by the end of the decade, but it will have mastered enough market share and mindshare to weather it as Microsoft has.
• ... Google becomes the next Microsoft. It won't be anything the founders do, but Google will do "something evil", and it will be loudly and screechingly pointed out by all of Google's corporate opponents, and the star will have fallen.
• ... Microsoft finds its way again. Microsoft, as a company, has lost its way. This is a company that's not used to losing, and like Bill Belichick's Patriots, they will find ways to adapt and adjust to the changed circumstances of their position to find a way to win again. What that'll be, I have no idea, but historically, the last decade notwithstanding, betting against Microsoft has historically been a bad idea. My gut tells me they'll figure something new to get that mojo back.
• ... a politician will make himself or herself famous by standing up to the TSA. The scene will play out like this: during a Congressional hearing on airline security, after some nut/terrorist tries to blow up another plane through nitroglycerine-soaked underwear, the TSA director will suggest all passengers should fly naked in order to preserve safety, the congressman/woman will stare open-mouthed at this suggestion, proclaim, "Have you no sense of decency, sir?" and immediately get a standing ovation and never have to worry about re-election again. Folks, if we want to prevent any chance of loss of life from a terrorist act on an airplane, we have to prevent passengers from getting on them. Otherwise, just accept that it might happen, do a reasonable job of preventing it from happening, and let private insurance start offering flight insurance against the possibility to reassure the paranoid.

See you all next year.

Why study new and different programming languages? To change your programming mindset. Not sure what I mean by that? Check this out.

Ever done one of these?

   1: public interface IService

   2: {

   3:   DateTime GetDate();

   4:   int CalculateSomethingInteresting(int lhs, int rhs);

   5: }

   6:  

   7: public class OneServiceImpl : IService

   8: {

   9:   public DateTime GetDate()

  10:   { return DateTime.Now; }

  11:   public int CalculateSomethingInteresting(int lhs, int rhs)

  12:   { return lhs + rhs; }

  13: }

  14:  

  15: public class AnotherServiceImpl : IService

  16: {

  17:   public DateTime GetDate()

  18:   { return new DateTime(); }

  19:   public int CalculateSomethingInteresting(int lhs, int rhs)

  20:   { return lhs * rhs; }

  21: }

  22:  

  23: public class ServiceFactory

  24: {

  25:   public static IService GetInstance(string which)

  26:   {

  27:     if (which == "One") return new OneServiceImpl();

  28:     else if (which == "Another") return new AnotherServiceImpl();

  29:     else throw new ArgumentException();

  30:   }

  31: }

  32:  

  33: public class App

  34: {

  35:   public static void Main(string[] args)

  36:   {

  37:     foreach (string s in args)

  38:     {

  39:       IService serv = ServiceFactory.GetInstance(s);

  40:       Console.WriteLine("serv calc = {0}", serv.CalculateSomethingInteresting(3, 3));

  41:     }

  42:   }

  43: }

So has my client this week. In fact, it's fair to say that they're infatuated with them—they've got services all over the place, including at their communication layer, where they use configuration files to decide which of the two service implementations to use, either a "native" .NET implementation or the "real" Web services implementation that they're supposed to be using. (They end up going back to the native implementation because sometimes—which is to say, apparently a lot of times—the Web services implementation is broken in some fundamental way. Go figure.)

The problem is, very bluntly, that the interfaces they're defining (the IService definition above) are ever-so-slightly different from the communications-based proxy interfaces that they use to communicate outside of this process, so some poor schmuck ends up having to write the service implementation (OneServiceImpl) that simply takes the parameters passed in, translates them into a call through the communications-based interface, then takes the response and hands it back. Tedious, mind-numbing coding, particularly painful when there are dozens of interfaces with (in some cases) hundreds of methods per interface. Ouch.

There had to be a better way.

Based on some of the work/research/play I've been doing with both dynamic and functional programming languages, it occurred to me that what they really wanted was some kind of "forwarding" or "delegating" behavior that certain languages have baked in as a feature. In those languages, it's possible to nominate a "delegate" object to which method calls are automatically forwarded if no such method is implemented on this object; in this particular case, what I'd do to replace all of the above is simply create an IService object instance that has either a OneServiceImpl or a AnotherServiceImpl instance (depending on the value in the configuration file) set up as the "delegate" object. That way the method calls remain statically type-checked, but none of this service interface/service implementation/service factory nonsense has to be created just to switch between the two.

(By the way, all of this pain goes away completely in a language that supports deferred checking of signatures until runtime. In other words, if the client had been programming in IronPython or IronRuby or even Visual Basic, we could get away with not having to do any of the above, and just use Reflection to access the appropriate method on whichever of the two service implementations they want to use at the time. Fan would let us do it if we used "->" instead of "." to invoke the method; Cobra would switch between the two automatically; and so on.)

Now, this is C# 2.0 that they're using, and they're pretty entrenched on that point, so I can't simply suggest that they use a new language, but if we take the basic idea and adapt it to C#, we can get pretty much the same behavior without having to force the poor schmuck on the bottom of the totem pole to write all those service implementations by hand.

We start by transforming the IService interface into an IService "interface" (meaning it's not really an interface anymore, but it'll sure look like one to anybody who's not paying attention):

   1: public class IService

   2: {

   3:   public Func0<DateTime> GetDate;

   4:   public Func2<int, int, int> CalculateSomethingInteresting;

   5: }

IService is now a class with fields (not properties, though I suppose if you really wanted them to be properties you could make them such, not that I see much value to doing so), where each field corresponds in name to the method of the interface it wants to replace, and the type is a delegate type parameterized to match the return type and parameter types of that same method of the original interface. Func0 and Func2 are delegate types I had to create, since nothing like them existed until C# 3.0; their definitions are pretty simple:

   1: public delegate R Func0<R>();

   2: public delegate R Func1<R, P1>(P1 p1);

   3: public delegate R Func2<R, P1, P2>(P1 p1, P2 p2);

Now, assuming we have the implementation classes from before, we have two choices; one is to write a by-hand factory that fills out the fields to point to the appropriate method on the implementation class, like so:

   1: if (which == "One")

   2: {

   3:   servInstance.GetDate = delegate() { return DateTime.Now; };

   4:   servInstance.CalculateSomethingInteresting = delegate (int lhs, int rhs) { return lhs + rhs; };

   5: }

   6: else if (which == "Another")

   7: {

   8:   servInstance.GetDate = delegate() { return new DateTime(); };

   9:   servInstance.CalculateSomethingInteresting = delegate (int lhs, int rhs) { return lhs * rhs; };

  10: }

  11: else

  12:   throw new ArgumentException();

But, quite frankly, this defeats the point—the point was to avoid writing all this stuff by hand, not simply repeat it in a different form. So instead, we leverage Reflection, which depends on the basic assumption that the field name in the IService "interface" matches the method name on the implementation class we wish to invoke. Assuming that holds (which it does, in my client's case, anyway), we can reflect on the IService field, find the matching method name in the implementation, then construct a delegate instance around that method and assign the delegate instance to the field. Once complete, we hand back the completed service instance, and the client literally doesn't know that anything's different:

   1: public class ServiceFactory

   2: {

   3:   public static IService GetInstance(string which)

   4:   {

   5:     IService servInstance = new IService();

   6:  

   7:     Type targetType = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().GetType(which + "ServiceImpl");

   8:  

   9:     foreach (FieldInfo fi in servInstance.GetType().GetFields())

  10:     {

  11:       MethodInfo targetMethod = targetType.GetMethod(fi.Name);

  12:       //Console.WriteLine("Wiring up {0} against {1} with {2}", fi.Name, targetType, targetMethod);

  13:       Delegate d = Delegate.CreateDelegate(fi.FieldType, null, targetMethod);

  14:       //Console.WriteLine(d);

  15:       fi.SetValue(servInstance, d);

  16:     }

  17:  

  18:     return servInstance;

  19:   }

  20: }

Remember, the client code still looks the same...

   1: public class App

   2: {

   3:   public static void Main(string[] args)

   4:   {

   5:     foreach (string s in args)

   6:     {

   7:       IService serv = ServiceFactory.GetInstance(s);

   8:       Console.WriteLine("serv calc = {0}", serv.CalculateSomethingInteresting(3, 3));

   9:     }

  10:   }

  11: }

... because what the client doesn't know is that he's accessing a field, then invoking the delegate that's being returned from that field dereference.

What this permits, aside from the automated wiring up of the IService "interface", is a greater degree of flexibility—rather than having to choose which implementation to use on an interface-by-interface basis, we can now configure to use different implementations on a method-by-method basis. But considering how many interfaces and implementations my client was looking at having to write by hand, the real win is in the automated ServiceFactory wiring.

By the way, the only reason we can get away with this sleight-of-hand is because delegates are deliberately designed to act like method calls; no explicit .Invoke() call is required, it's implied with the () after the delegate instance's name. If Java7 closures and/or method handles end up with support for that kind of syntax, then we can do the same thing in Java7 (more or less).

Make sense?

These are the things I think as I sit here in my resort hotel on the edge of the Dead Sea in Israel after the JavaEdge 2009 conference on Thursday:

• The JavaEdge hosts (Alpha CSP) are, without a doubt, the most gracious hosts I think I've ever had at a conference. And considering the wonderful treatment I've had at the hands of the 4Developers and JDD hosts in Krakow (Proidea) and the SDN hosts in Amsterdam, this is saying a lot. But the Alpha CSP folks have simply floored me, top to bottom, with their generosity and warmth.
• The JavaEdge crowd is a great one. I wasn't quite sure what to expect, because in the US we don't hear much about the tech going on in Israel, so I was a bit concerned that (a) my English was going to be difficult to grasp or that (b) my humor was going to sail over their heads due to the language barrier, or worse, (c), the developers at the conference wouldn't be ready to hear the keynote message ("Why the Next Five Years Will Be About Languages"). I shouldn't have been concerned on any of those points—this crowd understood me perfectly, laughed at most of my jokes (hey, not even my family gets all of them), and more importantly, not only accepted the thrust of the message but also came up to me afterwards and either sought clarification, challenged one or more points, or simply said they enjoyed the keynote. It was as engaged and enthusiastic a crowd as just about any I've had.
• Fan(tom) is something worth looking into. Some of the speakers at the conference were talking with me about Fan (recently renamed to Fantom, to make it easier to Google/Bing), and I've realized that Fan's too interesting a language for the amount of press that it gets. I think this is something I'm going to pursue in the coming calendar year, maybe put together some presentations and/or workshops on it.
• Israel is ready for Groovy, Scala, and closures in Java. These folks were chomping at the bit at the thought of using one or all of these, at least based on the comments and questions I got after the keynote.
• Swimming in the Dead Sea is a truly bizarre experience. To be honest, one doesn't really "swim" in the Dead Sea—one just rests on top of the water, because the salt content in the water is so high that it is (quite literally) impossible to go under the water. It's like lounging on an inflatable raft in the water, except without the raft. It borders on the creepy. Still, my skin is much softer now than it was before.
• Jerusalem is a fascinating city. Alpha CSP set me up with a tour guide (Ido Notman), and we toured Jerusalem yesterday: all four quarters of the Old City (the Christian quarter, the Jewish quarter, the Moslem quarter and the Armenian quarter), the "Tomb" of King David, the Holy Sepulchre (where Christ was supposedly crucified and buried), the Western Wall, and then back to Tel Aviv for the night. Throughout the entire day, Ido kept up a running commentary about the history of the city and the three religions that are centered there (Christianity, Judaism and Islam) and the stories/legends that each holds about the city's place in their religious beliefs. I came away just flat overwhelmed, and, once we got back, flat on my back—we walked for most of the day, and Jerusalem is not a flat city like you might expect—it's nestled in some serious mountains, which makes it a bit rough on the calves. But it was well worth it, because there's nothing like standing and looking at pillars right in front of you—excavated from beneath a high-rise apartment building, just there for anybody to stroll up to and see and touch and take photos with—that were built back when Rome meant the center of civilization. Wow.
• The Palestinian-Israeli and Arab-Israeli conflict(s) are a lot more "real" when you're in the middle of it (geographically). Seeing armed Israeli guards, driving through security checkpoints, even just driving past the wall that Israel is building to keep a physical barrier between them and Hamas/Hezbollah is all a vivid reminder that the nine-o'clock news is more than just something that's happening "over there" when you're "over there" too. The highway we took (the road from Jerusalem to Jericho, the same one mentioned in the parable of the Good Samaritan—and, yes, we passed the Inn of the Good Samaritan on the way here, which was just a little creepy and exciting and weird all at the same time) drove right alongside that wall for a stretch of about five or so kilometers, and I couldn't help but wonder if somebody in one of those apartment buildings over there, who had a clear line of sight to our car zipping by on the freeway, was looking at us through the scope of a sniper rifle. It's a creepy feeling, and even worse knowing that there may well have been an Israeli sniper looking back across the wall as well, into somebody's apartment. I won't weigh in on one side or the other here, because that's not my point; my point is that we in the US take our physical security way too much for granted, compared to some other parts of the world where it's not such a given.
• And no, in case you were wondering, I was never concerned for my safety. Yes, it's something I thought about. But you have a better chance of dying on a New York street corner from a runaway ice cream truck than you do from a rocket attack or a terrorist suicide bomb (or something like that). I'd come back in a heartbeat.
• Israelis really know how to party. First the after-conference party on Thursday night, then a quieter speaker dinner last night, but each time, the company was excellent, the food was amazing, and the wine/beer/liquor-of-choice was flowing fast. I don't know if it's just the Alpha CSP folks or Israelis in general, but these people really have a work-hard-play-hard mentality that I just love.

Thanks again to Miya, Ety, Shlomi, Roi, Alex and Ido for a wonderful combination work/vacation trip.

Paul asked me to review this, his first book, and my comment to him was that he had a pretty high bar to match; being of the same "series" as Release It!, Mike Nygard's take on building software ready for production (and, in my repeatedly stated opinion, the most important-to-read book of the decade), Debug It! had some pretty impressive shoes to fill. Paul's comment was pretty predictable: "Thanks for keeping the pressure to a minimum."

My copy arrived in the mail while I was at the NFJS show in Denver this past weekend, and with a certain amount of dread and excitement, I opened the envelope and sat down to read for a few minutes. I managed to get halfway through it before deciding I had to post a review before I get too caught up in my next trip and forget.

Short version

Debug It! is a great resource for anyone looking to learn the science of good debugging. It is entirely language- and platform-agnostic, preferring to focus entirely on the process and mindset of debugging, rather than on edge cases or command-line switches in a tool or language. Overall, the writing is clear and straightforward without being preachy or judgmental, and is liberally annotated with real-life case stories from both the authors' and the Pragmatic Programmers' own history, which keeps the tone lighter and yet still proving the point of the text. Highly recommended for the junior developers on the team; senior developers will likely find some good tidbits in here as well.

Long version

Debug It! is an excellently-written and to-the-point description of the process of not only identifying and fixing defects in software, but also of the attitudes required to keep software from failing. Rather than simply tossing off old maxims or warming them over with new terminology ("You should always verify the parameters to your procedure calls" replaced with "You should always verify the parameters entering a method and ensure the fields follow the invariants established in the specification"), Paul ensures that when making a point, his prose is clear, the rationale carefully explained, and the consequences of not following this advice are clearly spelled out. His advice is pragmatic, and takes into account that developers can't always follow the absolute rules we'd like to—he talks about some of his experiences with "bug priorities" and how users pretty quickly figured out to always set the bug's priority at the highest level in order to get developer attention, for example, and some ways to try and address that all-too-human failing of bug-tracking systems.

It needs to be said, right from the beginning, that Debug It! will not teach you how to use the debugging features of your favorite IDE, however. This is because Paul (deliberately, it seems) takes a platform- and language-agnostic approach to the book—there are no examples of how to set breakpoints in gdb, or how to attach the Visual Studio IDE to a running Windows service, for example. This will likely weed out those readers who are looking for "Google-able" answers to their common debugging problems, and that's a shame, because those are probably the very readers that need to read this book. Having said that, however, I like this agnostic approach, because these ideas and thought processes, the ones that are entirely independent of the language or platform, are exactly the kinds of things that senior developers carry over with them from one platform to the next. Still, the junior developer who picks this book up is going to still need a reference manual or the user manual for their IDE or toolchain, and will need to practice some with both books in hand if they want to maximize the effectiveness of what's in here.

One of the things I like most about this book is that it is liberally adorned with real-life discussions of various scenarios the author team has experienced; the reason I say "author team" here is because although the stories (for the most part) remain unattributed, there are obvious references to "Dave" and "Andy", which I assume pretty obviously refer to Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt, the Pragmatic Programmers and the owners of Pragmatic Bookshelf. Some of the stories are humorous, and some of them probably would be humorous if they didn't strike so close to my own bitterly-remembered experiences. All of them do a good job of reinforcing the point, however, thus rendering the prose more effective in communicating the idea without getting to be too preachy or bombastic.

The book obviously intends to target a junior developer audience, because most senior developers have already intuitively (or experientially) figured out many of the processes described in here. But, quite frankly, I think it would be a shame for senior developers to pass on this one; though the temptation will be to simply toss it aside and say, "I already do all this stuff", senior developers should resist that urge and read it through cover to cover. If nothing else, it'll help reinforce certain ideas, bring some of the intuitive process more to light and allow us to analyze what we do right and what we do wrong, and perhaps most importantly, give us a common backdrop against which we can mentor junior developers in the science of debugging.

One of the chapters I like in particular, "Chapter 7: Pragmatic Zero Tolerance", is particularly good reading for those shops that currently suffer from a deficit of management support for writing good software. In it, Paul talks specifically about some of the triage process about bugs ("When to fix bugs"), the mental approach developers should have to fixing bugs ("The debugging mind-set") and how to get started on creating good software out of bad ("How to dig yourself out of a quality hole"). These are techniques that a senior developer can bring to the team and implement at a grass-roots level, in many cases without management even being aware of what's going on. (It's a sad state of affairs that we sometimes have to work behind management's back to write good-quality code, but I know that some developers out there are in exactly that situation, and simply saying, "Quit and find a new job", although pithy and good for a laugh on a panel, doesn't really offer much in the way of help. Paul doesn't take that route here, and that alone makes this book worth reading.)

Another of the chapters that resonates well with me is the first one in Part III ("Debug Fu"), Chapter 8, entitled "Special Cases", in which he tackles a number of "advanced" debugging topics, such as "Patching Existing Releases" and "Hesenbugs" (Concurrency-related bugs). I won't spoil the punchline for you, but suffice it to say that I wish I'd had that chapter on hand to give out to teammates on a few projects I've worked on in the past.

Overall, this book is going to be a huge win, and I think it's a worthy successor to the Release It! reputation. Development managers and team leads should get a copy for the junior developers on their team as a Christmas gift, but only after the senior developers have read through it as well. (Senior devs, don't despair—at 190 pages, you can rip through this in a single night, and I can almost guarantee that you'll learn a few ideas you can put into practice the next morning to boot.)

Those of you who've seen me speak on Java 7 at various conferences have heard me lament (in a small way) the fact that Sun decided last year (Dec 2008) to forgo the idea of including closures in the Java language. Imagine my surprise, then, to check my Twitter feed and discover that, to everyone's surprise, closures are back in as a consideration for the Java7 release.

Several thoughts come to mind:

• "WTF?!?!? This is a community effort?" Originally, when Sun created the Java Community Process, the tradeoff for a committee-based development process was against the open and fair inclusion of ideas from outside of Sun. But with the Java7 release still lacking a JSR (as of a few weeks ago, anyway; I haven't checked today to see if it was opened), and both the Modules facility and language extensions deferred to "Projects" (not JSRs), it seems Sun is now abandoning the JCP in favor of a Sun-dominant process that is certainly solicitous of the community at large, but not constrained or defined by it. And for the life of me, I can't tell if this is a good thing or a bad thing. It's good in that now we don't have to garner a critical mass of community momentum to get something included into the platform or language, but it's bad in that Sun has historically been the bigger drag on innovation there, not the community.
• "Can we please stop calling them closures?" This is a nit, but technically what we're talking about adding here are either lambda expressions or anonymous methods, depending on whose glossary you're using when you're talking. A true closure is one that will compute all referenced variables from the enclosing scope and automatically include them in the generated code, which (so far as I can tell) none of the Java anonymous method or lambda expression proposals currently include. But it's a nit, so I'll say it this once and then drop it.
• "Will Groovy, Scala, Clojure and all other JVM languages please report to the refactoring room?" People look at me quizzically when I say I'd like to see Java have closures in the language, because in general my take on language features in Java is that the Java language is more or less dead, and I could care less what happens to it; I'd vastly prefer to code in Groovy or Scala or Clojure or JRuby before writing something in Java. My rationale for wanting closures in Java, however, is this: by defining a common implementation for closures in Java, all of the above languages can refactor their implementations of anonymous methods/lambda expressions/etc into something that uses Java's closure implementation, and that'll make calling Groovy anonymous methods from Scala much much easier.
• "Why there, now?" Devoxx is apparently turning into JavaOne Winter, because Sun's been making a lot of pretty big announcements at that show, including last year's "no closures, no built-in XML support, ..." announcement about Java7, and now this year's "well, we lied, we're thinking about closures again". Fortunately I think the Devoxx folks have much better skills at keeping their conference relevant to the Java community than JavaOne's organizers did. And I say that despite the fact (or perhaps because of the fact) that I didn't speak there this year.
• "When is this all supposed to ship again?" Originally, my understanding was that JDK7 was slated to ship in the early part of 2010, but now rumor has it slipping to this time next year (2010). That is a huge postponement, and gives Microsoft a bit of an edge, since Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0 are (again, according to rumor) supposed to ship somewhere around the end of 1Q2010. If Sun/Oracle keeps this up, we could very well be seeing a 2-.NET-releases-to-1-Java-release pattern, and that's disturbing in its own right. (Anybody else remember the days when Sun withdrew Java from ECMA, ISO and ANSI standardization consideration because they wanted to "innovate on the platform faster"?)
• "We really have no clue what we're talking about." Aside from rumors and hearsay (including the one that says that Mark Reinhold, who made the announcement, made up the syntax on the flight from the US to Belgium), we really don't have much by way of Sun-blessed official discussions of what this will look like or act like, at least none so far as I've been able to find, so any sort of supposition on whether it will be good or suck like an inverted hurricane is a tad premature. Trust me, I want to see where this goes, too, so I'll be keeping an eye out.

In the meantime, if you want to keep on top of the Java space, maybe it's time to consider a trip to Antwerp this time next year, since, if the new ship date rumors are to be believed,  it looks like Sun (once again) is planning to use Devoxx as the platform from which to make a large announcement, this time the release Java7 itself.

Update: Ola Bini noted that...

Two things:

• They are definitely closures. Calling them anonymous functions are incorrect, since they aren't really functions. Lambda expression is an OK name, but it has connotations that aren't really correct for a language like Java. A closure is defined as an anonymous piece of code that closes over at least one free variable, which in the case of this proposal will definitely happen. In fact, all of these will be closures, since they will be closing over the this at least.
• This is mostly on the level of compiler, syntax and type checking, and will NOT have any real implications for runtime. This means there will be no real sharing of implementation - at most JRuby, Groovy and Scala blocks will implement another interface (but all of them already implement Runnable and Callable so it's a limited win).

which prompted me to respond thusly:

First off, I actually never used the term "anonymous function"; instead, I said "anonymous method", which, as I understand it, is how the underlying implementation of these proposals will work: the syntax "#() return 42" will create an anonymous inner class instance of an interface defined by the library (in its "SimpleClosure" example, the BGGA compiler uses the interface "javax.lang.function.I", which has one method on it, "invoke()"), which, thus, makes this an anonymous method. We can't call them "anonymous functions" because Java has no function type, and probably never will. (And yes, it may seem like we're splitting hairs somewhat to differentiate between functions and methods,but once you've explored ML, Haskell, Scala, or F#, you really begin to see a huge difference in those terms, so it's important to be precise with our terminology, or else the conversation becomes almost entirely meaningless.)

Neal Gafter uses the definition "A closure is a function that captures the bindings of free variables in its lexical context." (http://gafter.blogspot.com/2007/01/definition-of-closures.html) Given that said same post also claims that Java has no function type (and therefore, by his definition, can't really have a closure), I suppose we could split the hairs even further and suggest that Java will never have closures until it has true function types. Personally, I'm happy to say that we can swap in "methods" for "functions" in this particular discussion, but my understanding is that capturing free variables also implies capturing variables referenced in the enclosing lexical context, which the current "closures" proposal (as reported by Alex Miller's closures page) will not do. (Non-final enclosing parameters will not be accessible, only those passed in formally as parameters. Stephen Colebourne reports as much: "[Mark Reinhold] also indicated that access to non-final variables was unlikely.")

Given that the current proposal suggests the new #() syntax will essentially generate an anonymous inner class with a method of the appropriate signature (though I do believe that method handles are targeted for use at some point, based on what I've been hearing through the rumor mill), to me it feels like the "closures" implementation is generating an anonymous method of an anonymous class with a few other restrictions included--hence my commentary above.

(Having said all that, the FCM proposal does provide complete capture of all referenced variables in enclosing scope, but Mark's keynote hasn't officially endorsed either the BGGA proposal or the FCM proposal, and if Sun keeps to their habits, they won't. They'll build something that's an amalgamation of all of them. Right now the current consensus seems to be to adopt the BGGA implementation behind the FCM syntax, which jives with Neal's 0.6a specification proposal.)

On top of that, the comment "all of these will be closures, since they will be closing over the this at least" is not, I don't think, entirely true. The details of the closures proposal aren't clear, but the "outer this" (which I believe is the "this" Ola refers to above) hasn't been explicitly mentioned in any of the closures proposals I've seen, nor have I seen any text suggesting that they will honor it, so I don't know that this is true. Of course, in absence of a specification or real working bits, all we can do is just speculate. However, having said that, playing around a bit with the BGGA prototype compiler (which, admittedly, is still one minor rev back from Neal's revised proposal), I saw no generated "outer this" in the generated code for the generated inner class implementation of the closure. If the comment above is meant to refer to the "this" of the inner class instance, then that would make all methods of an object-oriented language that provided an implicit "this" a closure, and somehow I doubt that's what Ola means, though I could, as always, be wrong.

As for the runtime implementation, as I said earlier I believe the plan is to use method handles (already on the table for JDK 7), which do have some runtime implications (generally good ones, from what I can tell so far), but not beyond what was already on the table for 7.

Phil Haack wrote a thoughtful, insightful and absolutely correct response to my earlier blog post. But he's still missing the point.

The short version: Phil's right when he says, "Agile is less about managing the complexity of an application itself and more about managing the complexity of building an application." Agile is by far the best approach to take when building complex software.

But that's not where I'm going with this.

As a starting point in the discussion, I'd like to call attention to one of Phil's sidebars: I find it curious (and indicative of the larger point) his earlier comment about "I have to wonder, why is that little school district in western Pennsylvania engaging in custom software development in the first place?" At what point does standing a small Access database up qualify as "custom software development"? And I take huge issue with Phil's comment immediately thereafter: "" That's totally untrue, Phil—you are, in fact, creating custom educational curricula, for your children at home. Not for popular usage, not for commercial use, but clearly you're educating your children at home, because you'd be a pretty crappy parent if you didn't. You also practice an informal form of medicine ("Let me kiss the boo-boo"), psychology ("Now, come on, share the truck"), culinary arts ("Would you like mac and cheese tonight?"), acting ("Aaar! I'm the Tickle Monster!") and a vastly larger array of "professional" skills that any of the "professionals" will do vastly better than you.

In other words, you're not a professional actor/chef/shrink/doctor, you're an amateur one, and you want tools that let you practice your amateur "professions" as you wish, without requiring the skills and trappings (and overhead) of a professional in the same arena.

Consider this, Phil: your child decides it's time to have a puppy. (We all know the kids are the ones who make these choices, not us, right?) So, being the conscientious parent that you are, you decide to build a doghouse for the new puppy to use to sleep outdoors (forgetting, as all parents do, that the puppy will actually end up sleeping in the bed with your child, but that's another discussion for another day). So immediately you head on down to Home Depot, grab some lumber, some nails, maybe a hammer and a screwdriver, some paint, and head on home.

Whoa, there, turbo. Aren't you forgetting a few things? For starters, you need to get the concrete for the foundation, rebar to support the concrete in the event of a bad earthquake, drywall, fire extinguishers, sirens for the emergency exit doors... And of course, you'll need a foreman to coordinate all the work, to make sure the foundation is poured before the carpenters show up to put up the trusses, which in turn has to happen before the drywall can go up...

We in this industry have a jealous and irrational attitude towards the amateur software developer. This was even apparent in the Twitter comments that accompanied the conversation around my blog post: "@tedneward treating the disease would mean... have the client have all their ideas correct from the start" (from @kelps). In other words, "bad client! No biscuit!"?

Why is it that we, IT professionals, consider anything that involves doing something other than simply putting content into an application to be "custom software development"? Why can't end-users create tools of their own to solve their own problems at a scale appropriate to their local problem?

Phil offers a few examples of why end-users creating their own tools is a Bad Idea:

I remember one rescue operation for a company drowning in the complexity of a “simple” Access application they used to run their business. It was simple until they started adding new business processes they needed to track. It was simple until they started emailing copies around and were unsure which was the “master copy”. Not to mention all the data integrity issues and difficulty in changing the monolithic procedural application code.

I also remember helping a teachers union who started off with a simple attendance tracker style app (to use an example Ted mentions) and just scaled it up to an atrociously complex Access database with stranded data and manual processes where they printed excel spreadsheets to paper, then manually entered it into another application.

And you know what?

This is not a bad state of affairs.

Oh, of course, we, the IT professionals, will immediately pounce on all the things wrong with their attempts to extend the once-simple application/solution in ways beyond its capabilities, and we will scoff at their solutions, but you know what? That just speaks to our insecurities, not the effort expended. You think Wolfgang Puck isn't going to throw back his head and roar at my lame attempts at culinary experimentation? You think Frank Lloyd Wright wouldn't cringe in horror at my cobbled-together doghouse? And I'll bet Maya Angelou will be so shocked at the ugliness of my poetry that she'll post it somewhere on the "So You Think You're A Poet" website.

Does that mean I need to abandon my efforts to all of these things?

The agilists' community reaction to my post would seem to imply so. "If you aren't a professional, don't even attempt this?" Really? Is that the message we're preaching these days?

End users have just as much a desire and right to be amateur software developers as we do at being amateur cooks, photographers, poets, construction foremen, and musicians. And what do you do when you want to add an addition to your house instead of just building a doghouse? Or when you want to cook for several hundred people instead of just your family?

You hire a professional, and let them do the project professionally.

The above quote was tossed off by Billy Hollis at the patterns&practices Summit this week in Redmond. I passed the quote out to the Twitter masses, along with my +1, and predictably, the comments started coming in shortly thereafter. Rather than limit the thoughts to the 120 or so characters that Twitter limits us to, I thought this subject deserved some greater expansion.

But before I do, let me try (badly) to paraphrase the lightning talk that Billy gave here, which sets context for the discussion:

• Keeping track of all the stuff Microsoft is releasing is hard work: LINQ, EF, Silverlight, ASP.NET MVC, Enterprise Library, Azure, Prism, Sparkle, MEF, WCF, WF, WPF, InfoCard, CardSpace, the list goes on and on, and frankly, nobody (and I mean nobody) can track it all.
• Microsoft released all this stuff because they were chasing the "enterprise" part of the developer/business curve, as opposed to the "long tail" part of the curve that they used to chase down. They did this because they believed that this was good business practice—like banks, "enterprises are where the money is". (If you're not familiar with this curve, imagine a graph with a single curve asymptotically reaching for both axes, where Y is the number of developers on the project, and X is the number of projects. What you get is a curve of a few high-developer-population projects on the left, to a large number of projects with just 1 or 2 developers. This right-hand portion of the curve is known as "the long tail" of the software industry.)
• A lot of software written back in the 90's was written by 1 or 2 guys working for just a few months to slam something out and see if it was useful. What chances do those kinds of projects have today? What tools would you use to build them?
• The problem is the complexity of the tools we have available to us today preclude that kind of software development.
• Agile doesn't solve this problem—the agile movement suggests that we have to create story cards, we have to build unit tests, we have to have a continuous integration server, we have to have standup meetings every day, .... In short, particularly among the agile evangelists (by which we really mean zealots), if you aren't doing a full agile process, you are simply failing. (If this is true, how on earth did all those thousands of applications written in FoxPro or Access ever manage to succeed? –-Me) At one point, an agilist said point-blank, "If you don't do agile, what happens when your project reaches a thousand users?" As Billy put it, "Think about that for a second: This agile guy is threatening us with success."
• Agile is for managing complexity. What we need is to recognize that there is a place for outright simplicity instead.

By the way, let me say this out loud: if you have not heard Billy Hollis speak, you should. Even if you're a Java or Ruby developer, you should listen to what he has to say. He's been developing software for a long time, has seen a lot of these technology-industry trends come and go, and even if you disagree with him, you need to listen to him.

Let me rephrase Billy's talk this way:

Where is this decade's Access?

It may seem like a snarky and trolling question, but think about it for a moment: for a decade or so, I was brought into project after project that was designed to essentially rebuild/rearchitect the Access database created by one of the department's more tech-savvy employees into something that could scale beyond just the department.

(Actually, in about half of them, the goal wasn't even to scale it up, it was just to put it on the web. It was only in the subsequent meetings and discussions that the issues of scale came up, and if my memory is accurate, I was the one who raised those issues, not the customer. I wonder now, looking back at it, if that was pure gold-plating on my part.)

Others, including many people I care about (Rod Paddock, Markus Eggers, Ken Levy, Cathi Gero, for starters) made a healthy living off of building "line of business" applications in FoxPro, which Microsoft has now officially shut down. For those who did Office applications, Visual Basic for Applications has now been officially deprecated in favor of VSTO (Visual Studio Tools for Office), a set of libraries that are available for use by any .NET application language, and of course classic Visual Basic itself has been "brought into the fold" by making it a fully-fledged object-oriented language complete with XML literals and LINQ query capabilities.

Which means, if somebody working for a small school district in western Pennsylvania wants to build a simple application for tracking students' attendance (rather than tracking it on paper anymore), what do they do?

Bruce Tate alluded to this in his Beyond Java, based on the realization that the Java space was no better—to bring a college/university student up to speed on all the necessary technologies required of a "productive" Java developer, he calculated at least five or six weeks of training was required. And that's not a bad estimate, and might even be a bit on the shortened side. You can maybe get away with less if they're joining a team which collectively has these skills distributed across the entire team, but if we're talking about a standalone developer who's going to be building software by himself, it's a pretty impressive list. Here's my back-of-the-envelope calculations:

• Week one: Java language. (Nobody ever comes out of college knowing all the Java language they need.)
• Week two: Java virtual machine: threading/concurrency, ClassLoaders, Serialization, RMI, XML parsing, reference types (weak, soft, phantom).
• Week three: Infrastructure: Ant, JUnit, continuous integration, Spring.
• Week four: Data access: JDBC, Hibernate. (Yes, I think you need a full week on Hibernate to be able to use it effectively.)
• Week five: Web: HTTP, HTML, servlets, filters, servlet context and listeners, JSP, model-view-controller, and probably some Ajax to boot.

I could go on (seriously! no JMS? no REST? no Web services?), but you get the point. And lest the .NET community start feeling complacent, put together a similar list for the standalone .NET developer, and you'll come out to something pretty equivalent. (Just look at the Pluralsight list of courses—name the one course you would give that college kid to bring him up to speed. Stumped? Don't feel bad—I can't, either. And it's not them—pick on any of the training companies.)

Now throw agile into that mix: how does an agile process reduce the complexity load? And the answer, of course, is that it doesn't—it simply tries to muddle through as best it can, by doing all of the things that developers need to be doing: gathering as much feedback from every corner of their world as they can, through tests, customer interaction, and frequent releases. All of which is good. I'm not here to suggest that we should all give up agile and immediately go back to waterfall and Big Design Up Front. Anybody who uses Billy's quote as a sound bite to suggest that is a subversive and a terrorist and should have their arguments refuted with extreme prejudice.

But agile is not going to reduce the technology complexity load, which is the root cause of the problem.

Or, perhaps, let me ask it this way: your 16-year-old wants to build a system to track the cards in his Magic deck. What language do you teach him?

We are in desperate need of simplicity in this industry. Whoever gets that, and gets it right, defines the "Next Big Thing".

Recently I've had the pleasure to make the acquaintance of Walter Bright, one of the heavyweights of compiler construction, and the creator of the D language (among other things), and he's been great in giving me some hand-holding on some compiler-related topics and ideas.

Thus, it seems appropriate to point out that Walter's willing to give lots of other people the same kind of attention and focus, in exchange for your presence in gorgeous Astoria, OR. The Astoria Compiler Construction Seminar is Walter teaching you about the nuts and bolts of building a compiler, from start to finish:

• Introduction to Compilers
• Lexing and Parsing
• Semantic Analysis
• Intermediate Representation
• Interpreters
• Optimization
• Code Generation
• Special Topics (thread-local storage, exception-handling, and so on)
• Building a Compiler for .NET

If you've got any interest whatsoever in building a language, but you're not sure how or where to get started, this seems like a great chance to sit down with one of the "big boys" and find out how to do it. And it doesn't hurt that Walter's an extremely pleasant guy to hang out with, either. (It doesn't hurt that he was the one who created the original Empire game, either. So at least you know you'll have something to play during the breaks.)

Go. Sign up. You'll thank me later.

Google made the announcement on Tuesday: Chrome OS, a "open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks."

Huh?

I'm sorry, but from a number of perspectives, this move makes no sense to me.

Don't get me wrong—on a number of levels, the operating system needs a little shaking up. Windows7 looks good, granted, Mac OS is a strong contender, and both are clearly popular with the consuming public, but innovation in the operating system seems pretty limited right now, to eye candy graphical window-opening/window-closing effects, different window decorations (title bars and minimize/maximize buttons), and areas along the edges of the screen to store icons. At no point has any of the last three or four OS releases from any of the major vendors—Microsoft, Apple, or the various Linux distros—really introduced anything novel, just infinite variations on a theme. Filesystems are still hierarchical, users still install and manage applications, and so on. In fact, arguably the most interesting development in operating systems has been the iPhone, and most of its innovations center around two things: the two-finger interface, and the complete mental reboot of what user interface looks and acts like.

Seriously, that's the best we can do?

I see a lot of room for improvements in the operating system experience; for starters, let's do away with the "browser" and just call Firefox, IE and Chrome what they're (far too slowly) evolving into: a generic application host. Get that story right—the acquisition of applications onto the device, the updating of those applications when new versions are available, the offline application experience, and so on—and the operating system and the browser will mesh into a seamless whole. But we're not there yet, not by a long ways, and the first competitor to create such an environment will have a huge advantage over its rivals. Arguably Apple got there first with the iPhone and AppStore, and yet the iPhone still needs iTunes running on a computer to make the experience seamless, and iTunes is definitely not what I call a seamless user experience.

(Besides, the iPhone is hamstrung on a number of levels—I would absolutely despise trying to write this blog post on it, for example.)

Despite the clear window of opportunity for an innovative operating system to step in and make some serious waves in the industry, Google producing an OS really doesn't make sense to me, for a number of reasons.

• Challenging your opponent on your opponent's turf is never a good idea. A maxim of battle says that one should only battle on favorable terrain, yet Google's deliberately choosing to "cross the line", as it were, into territory that is clearly foreign to them. They have no expertise in marketing it, selling it, researching it, or developing it, while their competitors in this—Microsoft, Apple being the principal two—have been doing it for decades. Literally. I realize that Google has a number of smart people working for them, but it seems pretty presumptuous and arrogant to think they can get this story better, particularly in any kind of short term.
• This is a difficult problem to tackle. Microsoft's known it for decades, Apple is discovering it all over again, and Linuxers have either wallowed in it as a sign of prowess or just accepted the problem as intractable—it's really hard to get an operating system to recognize the billions of different devices out there. Apple solved it by jealously and zealously chasing anyone who ever tried to run Mac OS on non-Apple hardware. Linux consumers found themselves recompiling kernels or in some cases, having to build device drivers themselves. Microsoft just suffered through it. For a new OS, the only path possible in the beginning is to support the 20% of the devices that 80% of the people use, and hope that nobody else tries a device that isn't on that list and blogs to tell about it. Unfortunately, the chosen target market (consumer netbooks) works against them here in a big way. With developers, it's pretty easy to say, "Sorry, guys, you know how it is, give us a few years, or contribute the patch yourself!"; with consumers, if their BuyMart-bargain-bin web cam doesn't work, it's Google's fault and they'll be up in the acne-spackled BuyMart counter boy's face about it. This will not persuade BuyMart to stock the Chrome-installed netbook for much longer.
• Is this really the company that swore to "do no evil"? Google's announcement is vague on so many levels, it's almost a FUD play, or else they're trying to blatantly cash in on their "geek cred" to convince investors and analysts that they've finally found a new source of revenue to supplement AdWords. (Well, modulo the fact that this new OS will be open-source, which means it's not really a revenue play, but I'm sure they've got that figured out somehow, too.) Seriously, this doesn't make sense: if you're doing an open-source OS, then where is the source? Where is the transparency? Where is my ability to contribute despite my status as a non-Google developer? What part of this project is open-source in any sense of the term?
• Netbooks? I realize that netbooks are the new hotness to a lot of people, a compromise between a phone/PDA and a laptop, and that the price point of the netbook means that for the first time, consumers can get into computing for under $250 (rivalling the price of game consoles) that addresses their fundamental needs—email, web surfing and maybe an application or two—but the timing here is just too late. Google's announcement says that "netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010". Which means that the major competitors (mostly Windows) will have twelve months to convince netbook consumers that Windows (and Windows7, in particular) is the right choice to run the netbook, and Google will be starting from some distance behind the 8-ball. Chrome needs to be available now if they're going to avoid a long and entrenched battle starting from a position of weakness.
• It's a distraction from their strength. Abraham Lincoln is famous for saying. "You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong", but this represents Google's third or fourth effort into a space that really isn't leveraging their core strength (their ability to scale). Even if the money and resources spent on Chrome (and Android, for that matter) have zero effect on the budgeting and resourcing for Google App Engine and other server plays, the message and story that Google presents to the world is now as disjoint and multifaceted (and therefore harder to grasp) as Microsoft's.
• Haven't we seen this before? Wasn't it almost a decade ago when another company announced a plan to unify the browser and the desktop? In that case, the world either yawned, rejected it outright ("I don't want to browse my desktop, damnit" was how one friend of mine put it), or sued them over it. Even if Google doesn't run afoul of the DOJ directly, Microsoft is going to love pointing to Chrome OS as clear indication of non-monopoly status the next time DOJ comes calling. If Google does manage somehow to annoy the DOJ antitrust personalities, well... let IBM and Microsoft tell you all about how much fun it is to try to innovate and bring products to market with lawyers looking over your shoulders.
• Haven't we seen this before? Not too long ago, another vendor tried to go after the "you don't need an operating system" story... except they called it "The Network Is the Computer". All you Java developers, raise your hand. Anybody who doesn't have their hand raised, ask what happened to that vendor from any of the people with their hand in the air. Or ask an Oracle DBA.
• Haven't we seen this before? Even more recently, another vendor made a play for the netbook+cloud story. All those who've heard of Cloud OS, raise your hand. Anybody who doesn't have your hand raised.... well, I wish I could tell you to go talk to the people with their hand raised, except I don't think anybody does.

This whole idea just feels badly-planned and not well thought-out. Let's see how it executes, so let's meet back here in a year and compare notes, but in the meantime, I'm not hanging up my Java or .NET tools any time soon.

OK, OK, I admit it. Maybe significant whitespace isn't all bad. (But don't let me ever catch you quoting me say that.)

The reason for my (maybe) shift in thinking? Manning Publications sent me a copy of Iron Python in Action, and I have to say, I like the book and its approach. Getting me to like Python as a primary language for development will probably take more than just one book can give, but... *shrug* Who knows?

Bear in mind, I have plenty of reasons to like IronPython (Microsoft's Python implementation for the .NET environment):

• A good friend of mine, Harry Pierson (aka @DevHawk), is the PM on the IPy project, and I'm generally prejudiced in favor of those things that people I know and respect.
• I'm generally a fan of dynamic languages, particularly those that let you do strange and twisted things to the type system and its instances at runtime. (Yes, I'm looking at you, ECMAScript...)
• I spent some quality time with IronPython Studio last year while researching a Visual Studio Extensibility "Deep Dive" paper.
• I've known Jim Hugunin (the creator of IronPython, and Jython before that) for some years, ever since his days working on AspectJ, and he's one of those scary-smart guys that, despite knowing they're scary-smart, still render me stunned when I listen to them.
• I'm a huge fan of the DLR. It's like having Parrot, but without having to wait a decade (give or take).

But, just to counterbalance the scales, I have plenty of good reasons to dislike IronPython, too:

• Significant whitespace.
• The "There's only one way to do it" oath that Pythonistas seem to hold as religion. (Somebody told me that building C-Python—the original implementation—only works for you if you swear a holy oath to The One True Way on the One True Way Bible. Needless to say, I believe them, and have never tried to build C-Python from sources as a result.)
• Significant whitespace.
• Uh.... did I mention significant whitespace yet?

I admit, it was with some hesitation that I cracked open the book. Actually, to be honest, I was really ready to just take out all my dislike of significant whitespace and pour it into a heated, vitriolic diatribe on everything that was just wrong with Python.

And...?

Well, OK, I admit it. Maybe significant whitespace isn't all bad.

But this is a review of the book, not the technology. So, on we go.

What I liked about the book

• The focus is on both .NET and Python, and doesn't try to short-change either the "Python"-ness or the ".NET'-ness by trying to be a "Python book (that happens to run on .NET)" or a ".NET book (that happens to use Python for code samples)". The authors, I think, did a very good job of balancing the two, making this the book to get if you're in that area on the Venn diagram where "Python" overlaps with ".NET".
• Part 2, "Core development techniques", starts down the "feed you the Python Kool-Ade" pretty quickly, heading straight into Chapter 4 ("Writing an application and design patterns with IronPython") without much of a pause for breath. The authors get into duck typing, protocols, and Model-View-Controller within the first four pages, and begin working on a running example to highlight some of the ideas. (Interestingly enough, they also take a few moments to point out that IronPython on Mono works, and include a couple of screen shots to that effect as we go, though I personally wonder just how many people are really going down this path.) I like the no-holds-barred, show-you-the-code style, but only because they also take time throughout the prose to talk about some of the concepts at work underneath and laced throughout the code. "Show me then tell me" is a time-honored tradition, but too many authors forget the "tell me" part and stop with code. These guys do a good job of following through.
• The chapters in Part 3, "IronPython and advanced .NET", form an interesting collection of how IronPython can fit into the rest of the .NET stack, demonstrating how to use IronPython with WPF, ASP.NET, and IronPython's crowning glory, Silverlight. If you're into front-end stuff, this is the section where I think you're going to have the most fun.
• The chapters in Part 4, "Reaching out with IronPython", is I think the most important part of the book, showing how to extend IronPython (chapter 14) with C#/VB extensions (similar to how a C-Python developer would extend Python by writing C code, but much much simpler) and the opposite—how to embed IronPython inside of existing C#/VB applications (chapter 15), which is really an exercise in using the DLR Hosting APIs. While the discussion in chapter 15 is good, I wish it'd had a bit more thorough discussion of how the DLR could be hosted regardless of the scripting language, though I admit that's pretty beyond the scope of this book (which is focused, after all, entirely on IronPython, and as a result should stay focused on how to host IPy).

What I found "Meh" about the book

• Part 1 ("A new language for .NET", "Introduction to Python", and ".NET objects and IronPythong") does a good job of bringing the rank beginner up to speed, getting some basic Python ideas across in the same breath that they bring .NET home. The only problem is, it only works well if you're neither a Python programmer nor a .NET programmer. Chapter 1, for example, does a sort of Cannonball-into-the-pool kind of dive into Python, but dives equally into the "Iron" parts as it does the "Python" parts. If you're either a Pythonista or a .NETter, I suspect you're going to be tempted to flip pages pretty quickly, and (I suspect) miss a few things. Chapter 2 is all about Python (meaning .NETters will probably spend some time here), but it certainly doesn't feel like an exhaustive reference, nor does Chapter 3 stand as an exhaustive discussion about all things .NET, either. I almost wish all three chapters had been collapsed into one—suffice it to say, I don't feel like I know the Python language, and don't feel like this book could be my Python reference next to me as I learn it, and I know that it's not a great .NET reference, either. Fortunately, the goal of these three chapters feels pretty clearly to be "Teach you just enough to make you dangerous (and able to understand the rest of the book)", and once we hit Part 2, rubber meets road pretty quickly.
• By the time you hit Chapter 7, less than halfway through the book, the authors have created a fairly nice, if simplistic, application for later dissection, but it's not until you hit Chapter 7 that they begin to start unit-testing, even though they insist (on page 17) that "Dynamic language programmers are often proponents of strong testing rather than strong typing" (a quote they attribute to Bruce Eckel, though I'm relatively certain I heard Dave Thomas and Neal Ford say it with respect to Ruby, long before Eckel started "Thinking in Python... or Flex... or whatever"). If unit-testing is that important, why wait three chapters into the application's development before writing a single unit-test? This doesn't jibe with me, somehow.
• If you're into back-end stuff, chapter 12 on "Databases and web services" is pretty bland. The fact that the two are combined into a single chapter is indicative, all by itself, of how deep or intensive the coverage goes, and there's zero mention of anything beyond basic ADO.NET. The coverage on web services covers REST relatively well, but there's zero coverage of WCF, and the whole of SOAP-based services is all of four or five pages. And Workflow? Doesn't exist, isn't even mentioned (except for an appearance in a table, "The major new APIs of .NET 3.0"). Yikes.

What I actively disliked about the book

Actually, not much. Manning did their usual superb job of arrowed callouts to point out particular concepts in the code listings, the copyediting is professional (meaning there's no obvious typos or misspellings that just break up the flow of prose, something that not all publishers seem to take seriously), and the graphics flow nicely alongside the prose, not dominating the page but accentuating it.

In fact, about the only thing I'd care to criticize is the huge number of footnotes, particularly in the first chapter. (By page 20 in the book, there have already been 30 footnotes.) When you have three footnotes per page, on average (and sometimes more), it does tend to distract, at least to me it does. It feels like there were ways, for most of them, to inject the idea or concept into the main prose, or leave it out entirely, but that could just be a difference of writing style, too.

Summation

If you're a .NET developer interested in learning/using IronPython on your next project, this is a definite winner. If you're a Python developer looking to see how to break into .NET, I'm not so sure this is your book, but I say that mostly because I'm not a Pythonista and can't really speak to how that mindset will find this as an introduction to the .NET space. My intuition tells me that this would be a good springboard into another book on .NET for the Python programmer, but I'll have to leave that to Pythonistas who've read this book to comment one way or another.

(Disclaimer: In the spirit of full disclosure, Stu is a friend, fellow NFJS speaker, and former co-worker of mine from DevelopMentor.)

I present this review to you in two parts.

Short version: If you want to learn Clojure, and you're familiar with at least one programming language, you'll find this a great resource. If you don't already know a programming language, or if you already know Clojure, or if you're looking for "best practices" to cut-and-paste, you're going to be disappointed.

Long version: Recently, fellow NFJS speaker Stu Halloway decided to take up a new language, and came to Clojure. He found the language interesting enough to write a book on it, something he hasn't done since his Java days, and the result is a nice walk through the language and its environment for experienced Java developers who want to understand Clojure's language, concurrency concepts, and programming model.

Now, let's be 100% honest about this: if you're coming at this book expecting it to be a language reference, you will probably be disappointed (as this guy obviously is). Stu's not like that—he's not going to re-create material that's available elsewhere, or that can be found with an easy Google search. Stu will not waste your time that way—he wants to tell you a story, one that takes you from "I'm a Java guy, but clueless about Lisp, dynamic languages, functional programming, concurrency, or macros" to "Wow. I know kung-fu." in the shortest path possible, but without trying to lobotomize you. He wants—no, expects—the readers of his book to be propping the text open with a cell phone on one side and the dinner plate on the other, craning your neck over to scan the pages and type in the examples into the REPL shell to try them out, see them work, then spend a few minutes experimenting with them before moving on to the next paragraph or page.

(Oh, I suppose you could just cut and paste them from the PDF version of the book, but where's the fun in that?)

The fact is, the concepts behind Clojure make up what's important to learn here, and readers of this book will come away like the panda from the movie, realizing that "There is no Secret Ingredient", that the power of Clojure comes not from its super-secret language sauce or special libraries, but in the way Clojure programmers approach problems and think about programming. And for that reason, if you're a programmer—even if you don't program on the JVM—you really want to take a look at what Stu's talking about (and Rich Hickey is creating).

Just remember, cellphone and dinner plate. Otherwise you'll be missing out on so much.

Well, OK, the title is trolling ever so slightly, but there is an interesting trend at work, and I'm genuinely concerned about its ultimate expression if the trend continues to its logical conclusion. Have a look and tell me if you agree or disagree.

Apparently the Rails community isn't the only one pursuing that ephemeral goal of "edginess"—another blatantly sexist presentation came off without a hitch, this time at a Flash conference, and if anything, it was worse than the Rails/CouchDB presentation. I excerpt a few choice tidbits from an eyewitness here, but be warned—if you're not comfortable with language, skip the next block paragraph.

Yesterday's afternoon keynote is this guy named Hoss Gifford — I believe his major claim to fame is that viral "spank the monkey" thing that went around a few years back.  Highlights of his talk:

• He opens his keynote with one of those "Ignite"-esque presentations — where you have 5-minutes and 20 slides to tell a story — and the first and last are a close-up of a woman's lower half, her legs spread (wearing stilettos, of course) and her shaved vagina visible through some see-thru panties that say "drink me," with Hoss's Photoshopped, upward-looking face placed below it.
• He later demos a drawing tool he has created (admittedly with someone else's code) and invites a woman to come up to try it.  After she sits back down, he points out that in her doodles she's drawn a "cock."
• Then he decides he wants to give a try at using the tool to draw a "cock" (he loves this word) — and draws a face, then a giant dick (he redraws it three times) that ultimately cums all over the face.
• A multitude of references to penises and lots of swearing — and also "If you are easily offended, fuck you!"
• And then, to top it off, a self-made flash movie of an animated woman's face, positioned as if she's having sex with you, who gradually orgasms based on the speed of your mouse movement on the page.

Wow. Just... wow. To call this unprofessional smacks of calling Hitler a "socially awkward individual"... or using a euphemism like "mild medical condition" to refer to death. This is so far "over the line" that it's unbelievable. Even Mr. Aimonetti's "CouchDB" presentation, as bad as it was, at least tried to tie the analogy together in a meaningful, if offensive, way. This is just male posturing at its worst. (I'm shocked Hoss didn't whip off his pants and demand the women in the room bow down in worship to his obviously superior manhood.)

Fortunately, according to the source, the conference organizer seems to be pretty responsive, so kudos to the one adult in the room, but....

What's worse, apparently the presenter and more than a few of his pals are (in the best traditions of assholery) blatantly unrepentant about the whole thing, claiming the moral high ground in much the same way that the Rails idiots did—it's all in good fun, if you don't find it funny you're a prude, and so on:

I checked Twitter (hashtag #flashbelt) to see what the responses were.  Here are some notable remarks:

• Fonx is reading the #flashbelt rants on Hoss offending the ladies w/ a few swear words & a penis drawing - r u really that prudish & sexist?
• nthitz lol @hoss69 "If you are easily offended, fuck you" #flashbelt
• livenootrac Ladies of #flashbelt , I am sorry for the Hoss preso, but in the flash community he gets a pass, kinda like Don Rickles - that's just Hoss.
• CujoJpn @livenootrac And there were many ladies at #flashbelt who were offended by Hoss' Preso some were thick skinned and took it as is.

So, if you didn't like it then
a) you are a prude - and sexist (?)
b) fuck you
c) suck it because Hoss gets a pass here in the boy's club known as "the flash community" and
d) you are a wimpy girl who isn't strong enough / man enough / "thick-skinned" enough  to deal with it.

Even more... wow. Talk about justification and marginalization. Amazing.

Before I figuratively smack this Hoss guy around the blog for a while, let's take a brief moment for reflection—what's going on here? Why all the misogynistic presentations recently? Is this reflective of a general trend in the programming industry? Of society in general? Is the world coming to an end?

A few possibilities present themselves:

• The lack of women in the IT industry means there's nobody around to act as a "gender filter" to keep things on an even keel. In other words, the genders constantly filter themselves based on the company they keep, and because the boys who put these presentations together don't have female input, they simply don't know where to draw the line for mixed company. This theory also presumes that an industry that's made up primarily of women will also lack such a filter and "girls will be girls" as a result. Unfortunately I have no good counterexamples at hand to examine—anybody know of an industry populated primarily by women, and can weigh in with experience there? The closest I get is my brief experience working in a restaurant with an almost-all-woman serving staff, and from that brief experience, yep, the theory holds. Solution? Easy: get more women in IT, and things will re-balance themselves naturally.
• Programmers are principally males who have no redeeming social skills. In other words, the industry gathers up exactly the kind of men who find objectifying women and reveling in late-acquired testosterone overdoses to be gratifying, and this kind of behavior is the result. If true, it leads to the conclusion that programmers are no more evolved than the Navy sailors involved in the Tailhook scandal of a few years ago. So go ahead, smack your wives and girlfriends around a little if they get a little "uppity", it's OK, 'cuz u r a l33t d00d. Personally? I find the idea ludicrous—there is definitely a strong antisocial streak that runs through the IT ecosystem (how many of you met your friends via World of Warcraft again?), but like all stereotypes, there's some elements of truth to it, and a lot of exaggeration. And frankly, anybody who believes in this theory is welcome to come with me to dinner at a No Fluff Just Stuff show and meet the other speakers, and listen in on our "boys club" conversations, including questions like, "Which movie best represents the book it was made after?" and "If given a mandate to create a programming language, what language would your language most resemble?". Oh, and the odd fart joke. We are boys, after all.
• We're hypersensitive to the subject right now. In other words, these kind of presentations have always been going on, and it's just that we notice them now, in the same way that you notice a particular brand of car on the road a lot more when you're thinking about buying that brand and model of car. Frankly, I don't buy this argument—I've been to a lot of presentations over the past decade, and I've never seen any that were anything like this.
• This is the YouTube generation, with access to everything the Internet has to offer, and this is "just how they do things". After all, how much maturity, sexual discretion and adult behavior can we expect of the generation that gave us "Girls Gone Wild" and its ilk? It's just a "generation gap" thing, and we old fogies who didn't grow up with Internet porn just a browser-click away just don't "get it". Hmm.... somehow, I just don't buy it. Sure, there may be some elements of this involved here (I'm really curious to see what all these "Girls Gone Wild" girls are going to say to their own daughters in a decade or so...), but I think that's too easy an answer, and an eminently unhelpful one.
• We have copycatters out there trying to follow the path of people they respect. If you're looking up at this Hoss character and thinking, "I want to be just like him!", you really should see a therapist and develop a sense of self, before you find yourself without friends. Hoss gets a pass because of your misguided fan-boi hero-worship. So does Paris Hilton. You want to be the Paris Hilton of your social circle? Go for it. After all, she's highly respected and loved, right? Take a clue from the next car wreck you drive past—everybody's slowing to look not because they wish they were in the body bag, folks, but because we have a ghoulish fascination with it. In the case of Ms. Hilton, that ghoulish fascination is with those who self-destruct in spectacular fashion. (Me, I'd love to be the fly on the wall at the Hoss residence when he tries to explain this whole thing to his daughter or his date/girlfriend/wife, if he ever finds one.)
• The presenters taking this tack are looking for an easy path to fame. In the grand traditions of Andrew Dice Clay ("Oh!"), the easiest way for a presenter to "stand out" from the rest of the crowd of presenters is to do something outrageous and call it "edgy", and stake out a claim on the edge of the civilization, rather than try to integrate with the rest of the crowd and build something up slowly. Don Box has already claimed "HTTP is dead", I made the analogy between a technology and a military conflict, and Matt Aimonetti claimed a data storage framework "performs like a pr0n star", so what's left but to stake out ground even further out on the fringe and just be misogynistic? Fortunately, history suggests that people with content-free/shock-heavy presentations (or even content-heavy/shock-heavy ones) don't go the distance, so to speak, and that once there's nowhere more shocking left to go, the audience comes back to the content-heavy/shock-light discussions and stays there for a while. Unfortunately, this means we're going to have to suffer through somebody's "Live YouPorn filming" talk first, which I'm not looking forward to.

And now for the smacking around... but you know, I suddenly realize that the volume of comments on the original post leave with nothing to do or say that's not already being said, so to just "pile on" would only serve to let me vent, and I have other outlets for that. But it would be inappropriate to just "walk away", so to speak, so with that in mind....

Hoss, you're an idiot. Like any sprinter, you're going to head up the pack for a bit, but soon enough, your "shtick" is going to flame out and you'll be left behind with all the other "shock jocks" of the 80's who found their material unwelcome after a while. So enjoy the spotlight (such as it is) while you can. In the meantime, I'm off to revise a few presentations, and stick with solid ideas and analogies, and maybe dropping the odd F-bomb when I want to make a point, just for emphasis, because I know something you apparently don't:

Shock makes a point because of the contrast to the rest of the talk, not because of its inherent "edginess".

Meanwhile, by all means, continue to be an idiot. You just make me look better by comparison, for which I thank you.

Update: See below, but I wanted to include the text Mike Abercrombie (DM's owner) posted as a comment to this post, in the body of the blog post itself. "Ted - All of us at DevelopMentor greatly appreciate your admiration. We're also grateful for your contributions to DevelopMentor when you were part of our staff. However, all of us that work here, especially our technical staff that write and delivery our courses today, would appreciate it if you would check your sources before writing our eulogy. DevelopMentor is open for business and delivering courses this week and we intend to remain doing so." Duly noted, Mike. Apology offered (and hopefully accepted).

An email crossed my desk today, announcing that DevelopMentor, home to so many good people and fond memories, has (at least temporarily) closed its doors.

I admit to a small, carefully-cushioned place in my heart where I mourn over this.

DevelopMentor was such a transcendent place for me. Much, if not most or all, of the acceleration that came in my career came not only while I was there, but because I was there.

So much of my speaking persona and skill I owe to Ron Sumida, who took a half-baked neophyte of intermediate speaking skill, and in an eight-hour marathon session still referred to in my mental memoirs as my "Night with Scary Ron", shaped me and taught me tricks about speaking that I continue to use to this day. That I got to know him as a friend and confidant later still to this day ranks as one of my greatest blessings.

I remember my first DM Instructor Retreat, where I met so many of the names I'd read about or heard about, and feeling "Oh, my God" fanboy-ish. I remember Tim Ewald giving a talk on transactions at that retreat that left me agape—I seriously didn't understand half of what he was saying, and rather than feeling overwhelmed or ashamed, I remember distinctly thinking, "Wow—I have found a home where I can learn SO much more." It was like waking up one morning to find that your writing workshop group suddenly included Neal Stephenson, Stephen Pinker, C.S. Lewis and Ernest Hemingway. (Yes, I know those last two are dead. Work with me here.)

I remember the day that Lorie (the ops manager at the time) called me to say that Don Box wanted me to work with him on the C# course. I was convinced that she'd called the wrong Ted, meaning instead to reach for Ted Pattison in her Rolodex and coming up a few letters shy. She tartly informed me, "No, I know exactly who I'm talking to, and are you interested or not?" How could I refuse? Help the Diety of COM write DM's flagship course on Microsoft's flagship technology for the next decade? "Hmm...", I say out loud, not because I needed time to think about it, but because a thread in the back of my head says, "Is there any scenario here where I say no?"

I still fondly recall doing a Guerilla .NET at the Torrance Hilton shortly after the .NET 1.0 release, and having a conversation with Don in my hotel room later that night; that was when he told me "Microsoft is working on an open-source version of the CLR". I was stunned—I had no idea that said version would factor pretty largely in my life later. But it opened my eyes, in a very practical way, to how deeply-connected DevelopMentor was to Microsoft, and how that could play out in a direct fashion.

When Peter Drayton joined, he asked me to do a quick review pass on the reference section of his C# in a Nutshell, and I agreed because Peter was a good guy (and somebody I'd hoped would become a friend), and wanted to see the book do well. That went from informal review to formal review to "well, could you maybe make it an editing pass?" to "Would you like to write a few chapters?" to "Well, let's sign you up as a co-author...". That project is what introduced me to John Osborn, which in turn led him to call me one day and say, "Some guys at Microsoft are working on an open-source version of the CLR, and would like to have a 'professional writer' help them write a book on it. Interested?" That led to SSCLI Internals, working with David Stutz, and wow, did I learn a helluvalot from that project, too.

Effective Enterprise Java came through DevelopMentor, thanks again to Don Box, who introduced me to the folks at Addison-Wesley that put the contract (and Scott Meyers, another blessing) in front of me.

DM got me my start in the conference circuit, as well. In 2002, John Lam pinged me over email—he'd recently become track chair for Connections down in Orlando, and was I interested in speaking there? I was such a newbie to the whole idea, but having taught classes roughly twice every month, I wasn't worried about the speaking part, but the rest of the process. John walked me through the process, and in doing so, set me down a path that would almost completely redefine my career within a year or so.

Even my Java chops got built up—the head of our Java curriculum was Stu Halloway (recently of Clojure fame), and between him, Kevin Jones, Si Horrell, Brian Maso and Owen Tallman, man, did I feel simultaneously like a small child among giants and like a kid in a candy store. Every time I turned around, they'd discovered something new about the Java platform that floored me. Bob Beauchemin has forgotten more about databases in general than I will ever learn, and he had some insights on the intersection of Java + databases that still hang with me today.

And my start with No Fluff Just Stuff came through DevelopMentor, too. Jason Whittington heard through a mutual friend (Erik Hatcher, of Ant fame) about this cool little conference being held in Denver, and maybe I should look into it. That led to an email intro to Jay Zimmerman, a dinner together while I was teaching in Denver a few weeks later, and before I knew it, I was on the Denver NFJS schedule, including the speaker panel, where I uttered the then-infamous line, "Swing sucks. Get over it."

DevelopMentor, you shaped my career—and my life—in so many ways, you will always be a source of pleasant memories and a group of friends and acquaintances that I would never have had otherwise. Thank you so much.

Rest in peace.

Update: Well, as it turns out, I have to rescind at least part of my eulogy, as the post itself generated quite a stir—the folks at DevelopMentor were pretty quick to email me, pointing out that they're still alive and well. In fact, as one of them (a friend of mine still working there) put it, "We were all kinda surprised when we came to work this morning and discovered that we could go home." Fortunately, the DevelopMentor folks were pretty gracious about what could've been a very ugly situation, and I apologize for to them for the misunderstanding—all I can say is that my "source" must've also been mistaken, and I'm glad that we're all still good. And lest it need to be said out loud, I heartily want nothing but the best for DM, and hope that I never have to write this message again.

Joel's weblog appears to be down, so in response to some emails I've posted my draft copy of SSCLI 2.0 Internals here. I think it's the same PDF that Joel had on his weblog, but I haven't made absolutely certain of the fact. :-/

If you've not checked out the first version of SSCLI Internals, it's cool—the second edition is basically everything that the first edition is, plus a new chapter on Generics (and how they changed the internals of the CLR to reflect generics all the way through the system), so you're good. And if you're not sure where to get the codebase for Rotor 2.0 (the SSCLI), well, here, I'll make it easy for you.

Gotta say, this is almost without question my favorite book to have written. Just wish Microsoft would've kept Rotor up with the successive CLR releases (3.5 SP 1 and now the forthcoming 4.0). Maybe, if I can find that wishing ring....

Yep, you heard that right—Aaron Erickson, author of The Nomadic Developer, is now a ThoughtWorker.

For those of who you don't know Aaron, he's been a consultant at another consulting company for a while, and has been exploring a number of different topics in the .NET space for a few years now, not least of which is one of my favorites (F#) and one of THoughtWorks' favorites (agile). He's been speaking at a number of events, including the Connections conferences, and he's going to bring some serious market-development potential to our Chicago office, something that's obviously of concern right now in these current economic conditions.

He also cooks a mean bacon-wrapped scallop, but that's another story for another day.

I'm looking forward to having him be a part of the growing collection of .NET rock stars at ThoughtWorks. Wanna come join us? Always room for a few more....

These are the things I think as I wing my way out of LA fresh from this year's TechEd 2009 conference:

• I think I owe the attendees at DTL309 ("Busy .NET Developer's Guide to F#") an explanation. It's always embarrassing when your brain freezes during a presentation, and that's precisely what happened during the F# talk—I completely spaced on the syntax for implementing an interface on a class in F#. (To the attendees who commented "consider preparing a bit better so you dont forget the sintax :)" and "Not remembering the language syntax sorta comes across bad doesn't it?", you're absolutely right, which prompts this next sentence.) I apologize profusely to those who were there—I just blew it. For the record, the missing syntax looks like this:

  #light
  
  type IStudy =
      abstract Study: string -> unit
  
  type Person(firstName : string, lastName : string, age : int) =
      member p.FirstName = firstName
      member p.LastName = lastName
      member p.Age = age
      override p.ToString() = 
          System.String.Format("[Person: firstName={0}, lastName={1}, age={2}]",
              p.FirstName, p.LastName, p.Age);
              
  type Student(firstName : string, lastName : string, age : int, subject : string) =
      inherit Person(firstName, lastName, age)
      interface IStudy with
          member s.Study(sub : string) =
              System.Console.WriteLine("Hey, Ma, I'm studying {0}!", sub)
      member s.Subject = subject
      override s.ToString() =
          System.String.Format("[Student: " + base.ToString() + " subject={0}]", s.Subject);
  

  
  
  Truth is, though, right now not a lot of people (myself included) are writing types that formally implement a given interface—the current common practice appears to be an object expression instead, something along these lines:

  let monkey =
      { new IStudy with
          member p.Study(subject : string) =
              System.Console.WriteLine("Oook eeek aah aah {0}!", subject) }
  monkey.Study("Visual Basic")
  

  
  
  In this way, the object handed back still implements the interface type that the client wants to call through, but the defined type remains anonymous (and thus provides an extra layer of encapsulation against implementation details leaking out). The most frustrating part about that particular snafu? I had a Notepad window open with some prepared code snippets waiting for me (a fully-defined Person type, a fully-defined Student type inheriting from Person, and so on) if I needed to grab that code because typing it out was taking too long. Why didn't I use it? I just forgot. Oy.....
• Clearly Microsoft is thinking big things about Azure. There were a lot of sessions around Azure and cloud computing, far more than I'd honestly expected, given how new (and unreleased) the Azure bits are. This is a subject I would have expected to see covered this deeply at PDC, not TechEd.
• TechEd Speaker Idol is a definite win, to me. I watched the final round of Speaker Idol on Thursday night (before catching the redeye out to Atlanta for the NFJS show there this weekend), and quite honestly, I was blown away by the quality of the presentations—they were all of them better than some of the TechEd speakers I'd seen, and it was great to hear that not only will the winner, who did a great presentation on legacy application support in Windows7 (and whose name I didn't catch, sorry) be guaranteed a slot at TechEd, but I overheard that the runner-up, a Polish security expert who demoed how to break Process Explorer (in front of Mark Russinovich, no less!), will also be speaking at TechEd Berlin this year.
• As always, the parties at TechEd were where the real value lay. This may seem like an odd statement to those whose heads are a bit full right now from five days' worth of material (six, if you attended a pre-con), but remember that I'm a speaker, so the sessions aren't always as useful as they are to people who've not seen this content before (or have the kind of easy access to the people building it and/or presenting it that I'm fortunate and privileged to have). Any future attendees should take serious note, though: networking is a serious part of this business, and if you're not going out to the parties (or creating a few of your own while you're there) and handing out business cards left and right, you're missing a valuable opportunity.
• I'm looking forward to TechEd 2010. Particularly because, thanks to a few technical snafus, I had the chance to sit down with the folks who organize and run TechEd and vent for a little bit about everything I found annoying (as a speaker). Not only were my comments not blown off, but it started a really productive discussion about how to make the behind-the-scenes experience for the TechEd speakers a more pleasant and streamlined one. What's more, we're planning to revisit some of these discussions in the months to come as they start their preparations for TechEd 2010 (in New Orleans). I'm looking forward to those conversations and (hopefully) helping them eliminate some of the awkwardness that I've seethed over in the past.

New Orleans in the summer will not be an entirely wonderful experience (I'm told it gets monstrously humid there in the summers, but it can't be any worse than Orlando is/was), but I'm honestly very curious to get back there to see what post-Katrina New Orleans looks and feels like, and to maybe do my (very little) part to help the area claw its way back by maybe staying an extra day or two and taking in some of the sights. (I'm hoping that Sara Ford will be willing to act as tour guide.....)

In the meantime, thanks to all of you who came, and remember—if you attended a talk and you want to say "thanks" to the speaker who gave it, the best way is to take the five minutes to fill out the evals for that talk. (Speaking personally, I don't even care so much about the scores you give me, but the comments are absolutely invaluable.)

See y'all next year!

Recently, NFJS alum and buddy Dion Almaer questioned the widespread, almost default, usage of a relational database for all things storage related:

Ian Hickson: “I expect I’ll be reverse-engineering SQLite and speccing that, if nothing better is picked first. As it is, people are starting to use the database feature in actual Web apps (e.g. mobile GMail, iirc).”

When I read that comment to Vlad’s post on HTML 5 Web Storage I gulped. This would basically make SQLite the HTML 5 for storage in the browser. You would have to be a little crazy to re-write the exact semantics (including bugs) of SQLite and its dialect. What if you couldn’t use the public domain code?

Gears lead out strong with making a relational database part of the toolbox for developers. It embedded its own SQLite, in fact one that was customized to have the very cool full text search ability. However, this brings up the point of “which SQLite do you standardize on?”

The beauty of using SQL and SQLite is that many developers already know it. RDBMS has been mainstream for donkey’s years; we have tools to manage SQL, to view the model, and to tweak for performance. It has gone through the test of time.

However, SQL has always been at odds with many developers. Ted Neward brought up ORM as the vietnam of computer science (which is going a touch far ;). I was just lamenting with a friend at Microsoft on how developers spend 90% of their time munging data. Our life is one of transformations, and that is why I am interested in a world of JavaScript on client and server AND database. We aren’t there yet, but hopefully we can make progress.

One of Vlad’s main questions is “Is SQL the right API for Web developers?” and it is a valid one. I quickly found that for most of my tasks with the DB I just wanted to deal with JSON and hence created a wrapper GearsDB to let me insert/update/select/delete the database with a JSON view of the world. You probably wouldn’t want to do this on large production applications for performance reasons, but it works well for me.

Now a days, we have interesting APIs such as JSONQuery which Persevere (and other databases) use. I would love to see Firefox and other browsers support something like this and let us live in JSON throughout the stack. It feels so much more Webby, and also, some of the reasons that made us stay with SQL don’t matter as much in the client side world. For example, when OODBMS took off in some Enterprises, I remember having all of these Versant to Oracle exports just so people could report on the darn data. On the client the database is used for a very different reason (local storage) so lets use JSON!

That being said, at this point there are applications such as Gmail, MySpace search, Zoho, and many iPhone Web applications that use the SQL storage in browsers. In fact, if we had the API in Firefox I would have Bespin using it right now! We had a version of this that abstracted on top of stores, but it was a pain. I would love to just use HTML 5 storage and be done.

So, I think that Firefox should actually support this for practical reasons (and we have SQLite right there!) but should push JSON APIs and let developers decide. I hope that JSON wins, you? I also hope that Hixie doesn’t have to spec SQLite :/

Dion's right when he says "developers spend 90% of their time munging data" and that "Our life is one of transformations", but I think he's being short-sighted and entirely narrow-minded when he says, "I am interested in a world of JavaScript on client and server AND database." Dion, I love you, man, but you're falling prey to the Fallacy of the One True Language. JavaScript (or ECMAScript, as its official name is given) is an interesting and powerful language, but why do you want to force your biases and perceptions on the rest of the world, man? You're being just as bad as the C++ or Java guys were in their heyday—remember when Java stored procedures were all the rage because "everybody knows that Java is the wave of the future"?

The fact is, from where I stand, there is no one storage solution or language solution or user-interface solution that is the Right Thing To Do in all situations. Not even inside the browser. There will be situations where a SQLite is the Right Thing, and other situations where a document-oriented JSON-like or CouchDB-like thing will be the Right Thing, and trying to force-feed one into a situation that's best solved by the other is a bad idea.

Dion alludes to my article about the Vietnam of Computer Science, but in fact, his suggestion charges right into another quagmire—how long before somebody starts trying to create a JSON-to-RDBMS adaption layer? Or JSON-to-CouchDB? Or things equally ridiculous? The fact is, data has three fundamentally different "shapes" to it, and trying to pound data from one shape into the other has all the efficacy and elegance to it just as much as pounding round pegs into square holes does. Dion even alludes to this with this paragraph:

One of Vlad’s main questions is “Is SQL the right API for Web developers?” and it is a valid one. I quickly found that for most of my tasks with the DB I just wanted to deal with JSON and hence created a wrapper GearsDB to let me insert/update/select/delete the database with a JSON view of the world. You probably wouldn’t want to do this on large production applications for performance reasons, but it works well for me.

JSON is certainly an attractive representation format for ECMAScript objects, thanks to its fundamental roots in ECMAScript's object literal syntax, and the powerful/dangerous eval() functionality offered by ECMAScript environments, but JSON also lacks a number of things a SQL-based dialect has, including a powerful query syntax for selecting individual and subsets of entities from the whole, which only becomes more and more necessary as the data base itself gets larger and larger. (Anybody who suggests that a local browser store would only remain within a certain size is clearly not thinking further ahead than the current day. Look at how cookies are outrageously abused as local storage for a lot of sites, or how Viewstate was abused in early ASP.NET apps—if you give the HTML/front-end developer a local storage mechanism, they will use it, and use it as far and as long and as hard as they can.) On top of which, JSON simply doesn't have the years of solid backing behind it than a SQL-based storage format does. And so on, and so on, and so on.

Ironically, just as JSON is a scheme for representing native objects in some kind of data format (in this case, a plain-text one), developers casually ignore the idea of storing objects in a native data format with all of the other bells-and-whistles that a database provides. Naturally, I'm referring to the idea of an object database—if JSON is appropriate for storing certain kinds of data in certain scenarios, then why isn't it appropriate to consider a native object database for some of those same certain kinds of scenarios? Not that I have anything against a JSON-based database scenario—in fact, I can easily imagine a JSON database that indexes the properties of the stored objects and takes ECMAScript functions as "native queries" in the same way that db4o doe. But let's stop with the repeated attempts at "one size fits all", and just accept that the world is a polyglot world, and that no one language—or data storage format, or data access API—will be the Right Thing To Do for all scenarios. Each language, format, API or tool has a reason to exist, a particular way it looks at the world, and optimizes itself to work best when used in that particular style. Trying to force one into the terms of the other is the road to another Computer Science quagmire.

Viva la Polyglot!

The Simple-Talk newsletter is a monthly e-zine that the folks over at Red Gate Software (makers of some pretty cool toys, including their ANTS Profiler, and recent inheritors of the Reflector utility legacy) produce, usually to good effect.

But this month carried with it an interesting editorial piece, which I reproduce in its entirety here:

When the market is slack, nothing succeeds better at tightening it up than promoting serial group-panic within the community. As an example of this, a wave of multi-core panic spread across the Internet about 18 months ago. IT organizations, it was said, urgently had to improve application performance by an order of magnitude in order to cope with rising demand. We wouldn't be able to meet that need because we were at the "end of the road" with regard to step changes in processor power and clock speed. Multi-core technology was the only sure route to improving the speed of applications but, unfortunately, our current "serial" programming techniques, and the limited multithreading capabilities of our programming languages and programmers, left us ill-equipped to exploit it. Multi-core mania gripped the industry.

However, the fever was surprisingly short-lived. Intel's "largest open-source effort ever" to provide a standard tool for writing multi-threaded code, caused little more than a ripple of interest. Various books, rushed out while the temperature soared, advocated the urgent need for new "multi-core-friendly" programming models, involving such things as "software pipelines". Interesting as they undoubtedly are, they sit stolidly on bookshelves, unread.

The truth is that it's simply not a big issue for the majority of people. Writing truly "concurrent" applications in languages such as C# is difficult, as you get very little help from the language. It means getting involved with low-level concurrency primitives, such as lock statements and so on.

Many programmers lack the skills to do this, but more pertinently lack the need. Increasingly, programmers work in a web environment. As long as these web applications are deployed to a load-balanced web farm, then page requests can be handled in parallel so all available cores will be used efficiently without the need for the programmer to be concerned with fine-grained parallelism.

Furthermore, the SQL Server engine behind these web applications is intrinsically "parallel", and can handle and use effectively about as many cores as you care to throw at it. SQL itself is a declarative rather than procedural language, so it is fundamentally concurrent.

A minority of programmers, for example games programmers or those who deal with "embarrassingly parallel" desktop applications such as Photoshop, do need to start working with the current tools and 'low-level' coding techniques that will allow them to exploit multi-core technology. Although currently perceived to be more of "academic" interest, concurrent languages such as Erlang, and concurrency techniques such as "software transactional memory", may yet prove to be significant.

For most programmers and for most web applications, however, the multi-core furore is a storm in a teacup; it's just not relevant. The web and database platforms already cope with concurrency requirements. We are already doing it.

My hope is that this newsletter, sent on April 1st, was intended to be a joke. Having said that, I can’t find any verbage in the email that suggests that it is, in which case, I have to treat it as a legitimate editorial.

And frankly, I think it’s all crap.

It's dangerously ostrichian in nature—it encourages developers to simply bury their heads in the sand and ignore the freight train that's coming their way. Permit me, if you will, a few minutes of your time, that I may be allowed to go through and demonstrate the reasons why I say this.

To begin ...

When the market is slack, nothing succeeds better at tightening it up than promoting serial group-panic within the community. As an example of this, a wave of multi-core panic spread across the Internet about 18 months ago. IT organizations, it was said, urgently had to improve application performance by an order of magnitude in order to cope with rising demand. [...] Multi-core mania gripped the industry.

Point of fact: The “panic” cited here didn’t start about 18 months ago, it started with Herb Sutter’s most excellent (and not only highly recommended but highly required) article, “The Free Lunch is Over: A Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in Software”, appeared in the pages of Dr. Dobb’s Journal in March of 2005. (Herb’s website notes that “a much briefer version under the title “The Concurrency Revolution” appeared in C/C++ User’s Journal” the previous month.) And the panic itself wasn’t rooted in the idea that we weren’t going to be able to cope with rising demand, but that multi-core CPUs, back then a rarity and reserved only for hardware systems in highly-specialized roles, were in fact becoming commonplace in servers, and worse, as they migrated into desktops, they would quickly a fact of life that every developer would need to face. Herb demonstrated this by pointing out that CPU speeds had taken an interesting change of pace in early 2003:

Around the beginning of 2003, [looking at the website Figure 1 graph] you’ll note a disturbing sharp turn in the previous trend toward ever-faster CPU clock speeds. I’ve added lines to show the limit trends in maximum clock speed; instead of continuing on the previous path, as indicated by the thin dotted line, there is a sharp flattening. It has become harder and harder to exploit higher clock speeds due to not just one but several physical issues, notably heat (too much of it and too hard to dissipate), power consumption (too high), and current leakage problems.

Joe Armstrong, creator of Erlang, noted in a presentation at QCon London 2007 that another of those physical limitations was the speed of light—that for the first time, CPU signal couldn't get from one end of the chip to the other in a single clock cycle.

Quick: What’s the clock speed on the CPU(s) in your current workstation? Are you running at 10GHz? On Intel chips, we reached 2GHz a long time ago (August 2001), and according to CPU trends before 2003, now in early 2005 we should have the first 10GHz Pentium-family chips.

Just to (re-)emphasize the point, here, now, in early 2009, we should be seeing the first 20 or 40 GHz processors, and clearly we’re still plodding along in the 2 – 3 GHz range. The "Quake Rule" (when asked about perf problems, tell your boss you'll need eighteen months to get a 2X improvement, then bury yourselves in a closet for 18 months playing Quake until the next gen of Intel hardware comes out) no longer works.

For the near-term future, meaning for the next few years, the performance gains in new chips will be fueled by three main approaches, only one of which is the same as in the past. The near-term future performance growth drivers are:

• hyperthreading
• multicore
• cache

Hyperthreading is about running two or more threads in parallel inside a single CPU. Hyperthreaded CPUs are already available today, and they do allow some instructions to run in parallel. A limiting factor, however, is that although a hyper-threaded CPU has some extra hardware including extra registers, it still has just one cache, one integer math unit, one FPU, and in general just one each of most basic CPU features. Hyperthreading is sometimes cited as offering a 5% to 15% performance boost for reasonably well-written multi-threaded applications, or even as much as 40% under ideal conditions for carefully written multi-threaded applications. That’s good, but it’s hardly double, and it doesn’t help single-threaded applications.

Multicore is about running two or more actual CPUs on one chip. Some chips, including Sparc and PowerPC, have multicore versions available already. The initial Intel and AMD designs, both due in 2005, vary in their level of integration but are functionally similar. AMD’s seems to have some initial performance design advantages, such as better integration of support functions on the same die, whereas Intel’s initial entry basically just glues together two Xeons on a single die. The performance gains should initially be about the same as having a true dual-CPU system (only the system will be cheaper because the motherboard doesn’t have to have two sockets and associated “glue” chippery), which means something less than double the speed even in the ideal case, and just like today it will boost reasonably well-written multi-threaded applications. Not single-threaded ones.

Finally, on-die cache sizes can be expected to continue to grow, at least in the near term. Of these three areas, only this one will broadly benefit most existing applications. The continuing growth in on-die cache sizes is an incredibly important and highly applicable benefit for many applications, simply because space is speed. Accessing main memory is expensive, and you really don’t want to touch RAM if you can help it. On today’s systems, a cache miss that goes out to main memory often costs 10 to 50 times as much getting the information from the cache; this, incidentally, continues to surprise people because we all think of memory as fast, and it is fast compared to disks and networks, but not compared to on-board cache which runs at faster speeds. If an application’s working set fits into cache, we’re golden, and if it doesn’t, we’re not. That is why increased cache sizes will save some existing applications and breathe life into them for a few more years without requiring significant redesign: As existing applications manipulate more and more data, and as they are incrementally updated to include more code for new features, performance-sensitive operations need to continue to fit into cache. As the Depression-era old-timers will be quick to remind you, “Cache is king.”

Herb’s article was a pretty serious wake-up call to programmers who hadn’t noticed the trend themselves. (Being one of those who hadn’t noticed, I remember reading his piece, looking at that graph, glancing at the open ad from Fry’s Electronics sitting on the dining room table next to me, and saying to myself, “Holy sh*t, he’s right!”.) Does that qualify it as a “mania”? Perhaps if you’re trying to pooh-pooh the concern, sure. But if you’re a developer who’s wondering where you’re going to get the processing power to address the ever-expanding list of features your users want, something Herb points out as a basic fact of life in the software development world ...

There’s an interesting phenomenon that’s known as “Andy giveth, and Bill taketh away.” No matter how fast processors get, software consistently finds new ways to eat up the extra speed. Make a CPU ten times as fast, and software will usually find ten times as much to do (or, in some cases, will feel at liberty to do it ten times less efficiently).

...  then eking out the best performance from an application is going to remain at the top of the priority list. Users are classic consumers: they will always want more and more for the same money as before. Ignore this truth of software (actually, of basic microeconomics) at your peril.

To get back to the editorial, we next come to ...

However, the fever was surprisingly short-lived. Intel's "largest open-source effort ever" to provide a standard tool for writing multi-threaded code, caused little more than a ripple of interest. Various books, rushed out while the temperature soared, advocated the urgent need for new "multi-core-friendly" programming models, involving such things as "software pipelines". Interesting as they undoubtedly are, they sit stolidly on bookshelves, unread.

Wow. Talk about your pretty aggressive accusation without any supporting evidence or citation whatsoever.

Intel's not big into the open-source space, so it doesn't take much for an open-source project from them to be their "largest open-source effort ever". (What, they're going to open-source the schematics for the Intel chipline? Who could read them even if they did? Who would offer up a patch? What good would it do?) The fact that Intel made the software available in the first place meant that they knew the hurdle that had yet to be overcome, and wanted to aid developers in overcoming it. They're members of the OpenMP group for the same reason.

Rogue Wave's software pipelines programming model is another case where real benefits have accrued, backed by case studies. (Disclaimer: I know this because I ghost-wrote an article for them on their Software Pipelines implementation.) Let's not knock something that's actually delivered value. Pipelines aren't going to be the solution to every problem, granted, but they're a useful way of structuring a design, one that's curiously similar to what I see in functional programming languages.

But simply defending Intel's generosity or the validity of an alternative programming model doesn't support the idea that concurrency is still a hot topic. No, for that, I need real evidence, something with actual concrete numbers and verifiable fact to it.

Thus, I point to Brian Goetz’s Java Concurrency in Practice, one of those “books, rushed out while the temperature soared”, which also turned out to be the best-selling book at Java One 2007, and the second-best-selling book (behind only Joshua Bloch’s unbelievably good Effective Java (2nd Ed) ) at Java One 2008. Clearly, yes, bestselling concurrency books are just a myth, alongside the magical device that will receive messages from all over the world and play them into your brain (by way of your ears) on demand, or the magical silver bird that can wing its way through the air with no visible means of support as it does so. Myths, clearly, all of them.

To continue...

The truth is that it's simply not a big issue for the majority of people. Writing truly "concurrent" applications in languages such as C# is difficult, as you get very little help from the language. It means getting involved with low-level concurrency primitives, such as lock statements and so on.

Many programmers lack the skills to do this, but more pertinently lack the need. Increasingly, programmers work in a web environment. As long as these web applications are deployed to a load-balanced web farm, then page requests can be handled in parallel so all available cores will be used efficiently without the need for the programmer to be concerned with fine-grained parallelism.

He’s right when he says you get very little help from the language, be it C# or Java or C++. And getting involved with low-level concurrency primitives is clearly not in anybody’s best interests, particularly if you’re not a concurrency guru like Brian. (And let’s be honest, even low-level concurrency gurus like Brian, or Joe Duffy, who wrote Concurrent Programming on Windows, or Mike Woodring, who co-authored Win32 Multithreaded Programming, have better things to do.) But to say that they “pertinently lack the need” is a rather impertinent statement. “As long as these web applications are deployed to a load-balanced web farm", which is very likely to continue to happen, “then page requests can be handled in parallel so all available cores will be used …”

Um... excuse me?

Didn’t you just say that programmers didn’t need to learn concurrency constructs? It would strike me that if their page requests are being handled in parallel that they have to learn how to write code that won’t break when it’s accessed in parallel or lead to data-corruption problems or race conditions when their pages are accessed in parallel. If parallelism is a fundamental part of the Web, don’t you think it’s important for them to learn how to write programs that can behave correctly in parallel?

Look for just a moment at the average web application: if data is stored in a per-user collection, and two simultaneous requests come in from a given user (perhaps because the page has AJAX requests being generated by the user on the page, or perhaps because there’s a frameset that’s generating requests for each sub-frame, or ...), what happens if the code is written to read a value from the session, increment it, and store it back? ASP.NET can save you here, a little, in that it used to establish a per-user lock on the entirety of the page request (I don’t know if it still does this—I really have lost any desire to build web apps ever again), but that essentially puts an artificial throttle on the scalability of your system, and makes the end-users’ experience that much slower. Load-balancer going to spray the request all over the farm? So long as the user session state is stored on every machine in the farm, that’ll work... But of course if you store the user’s state in the SQL instance behind each of those machines on the farm, then you take the performance hit of an extra network round-trip (at which point we’re back to concurrency in the database) ...

... all because the programmer couldn’t figure out how to make “lock” work? This is progress?

The Java Servlet specification specifically backed away from this "lock on every request" approach because of the performance implications. I heard a fair amount of wailing and gnashing during the early ASP.NET days over this. I heard the ASP.NET dev team say they made their decision because the average developer can't figure out concurrency correctly anyway.

And, by the way folks, this editorial completely ignores XML services. I guess "real" applications don't write services much, either.

The next part is even better:

Furthermore, the SQL Server engine behind these web applications is intrinsically "parallel", and can handle and use effectively about as many cores as you care to throw at it. SQL itself is a declarative rather than procedural language, so it is fundamentally concurrent.

True… and false. SQL is fundamentally “parallel” (largely because SQL is a non-strict functional language, not just a “declarative” one), but T-SQL isn’t. And how many developers actually know where the line is drawn between SQL and T-SQL? More importantly, though, how many effective applications can be written with a complete ignorance of the underlying locking model? Why do DBAs spend hours tuning the database’s physical constructs, establishing where isolation levels can be turned down, establishing where the scope of a transaction is too large, putting in indexed columns where necessary, and figuring out where page, row, or table locking will be most efficient? Because despite the view that a relational database presents, these queries are being executed in parallel, and if a developer wants to avoid writing an application that requires a new server for each and every new user added to the system, they need to learn how to maximize their use of the database’s parallelism. So even if the language is "fundamentally concurrent" and can thus be relied upon to do the right thing on behalf of the developer, the implementation isn't, and needs to be understood in order to be implemented efficiently.

He finishes:

For most programmers and for most web applications, however, the multi-core furore is a storm in a teacup; it's just not relevant. The web and database platforms already cope with concurrency requirements. We are already doing it.

This is one of those times I wish I had a time machine handy—I'd love to step forward five years, have a look around, then come back and report the findings. I'm tempted to close with the challenge to just let’s come back in five years and see what the programming language landscape and hardware landscape looks like. But that's too easy an "out", and frankly, doesn't do much to really instill confidence, in my opinion.

To ignore the developers building "rich" applications (be they being done in Flex/Flash, Cocoa/iPhone, WinForms, Swing, WPF, or what-have-you) is to also ignore a relatively large segment of the market. Not every application is being built on the web and is backed by a relational database—to simply brush those off and not even consider them as part of the editorial reveals a dangerous bias on the editor's part. And those applications aren't hosted in an "intrinsically 'parallel'" container that developers can just bury their head inside.

Like it or not, folks, the path forward isn't one that you get to choose. Intel, AMD, and other chip manufacturers have already made that clear. They're not going to abandon the multicore approach now, not when doing so would mean trying to wrestle with so many problems (including trying to change the speed of light) that simply aren't there when using a multicore foundation. That isn't up for debate anymore. Multicore has won for the forseeable future. And, as a result, multicore is going to be a fact of the developer's life for the forseeable future. Concurrency is thus also a fact of the developer's life for the forseeable future.

The web and database platforms “cope” with concurrency requirements by either making "one-size-fits-all" decisions that almost always end up being the wrong decision for high-scale systems (but I'm sure your new startup-based idea, like a system that allows people to push "micro-entries" of no more than 140 characters in length to a publicly-trackable feed would never actually take off and start carrying millions and millions of messages every day, right?), or by punting entirely and forcing developers to dig deeper beneath the covers to see the concurrency there. So if you're happy with your applications running no faster than 2GHz for the rest of the forseeable future, then sure, you don't need to worry about learning concurrency-friendly kinds of programming techniques. Bear in mind, by the way, that this essentially locks you in to small-scale, web-plus-database systems for the forseeable future, and clearly nothing with any sort of CPU intensiveness to it whatsoever. Be happy in your niche, and wave to the other COBOL programmers who made the same decision.

This is a leaky abstraction, full stop, end of story. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either trolling for hits, trying to sell you something, or striving to persuade developers that ignorance isn't such a bad place to be.

All you ignorant developers, this is the phrase you will be forced to learn before you start your next job: "Would you like fries with that?"

While playing around with a recent research-oriented project for myself (more on that later), I discovered something that I haven't seen mentioned anywhere in the Scala universe before. (OK, not really--as you'll see towards the end of this piece, it really is documented, but allow me my brief delusions of grandeur as I write this. They'll get deflated quickly enough.)

So the core of the thing was a stack-oriented execution engine; essentially I'm processing commands delivered in a postfix manner. Since some of these commands are relational operators, it's important that there be two things to relationally operate on the execution stack, after which I want to evaluate the relational operation and push its result (1 if true, 0 if false) back on the stack; this is pretty easily done via the following:

def compareOp(op : (Int, Int) => Boolean) =
{
  checkStack(2)
  val v1 = (execStack.pop()).asInstanceOf[Int]
  val v2 = (execStack.pop()).asInstanceOf[Int]
  val vr = op(v1, v2)
  execStack.push(if (vr) 1 else 0)
} 

where "execStack" is a mutable.Stack[Any] held in an enclosing function.

Interestingly enough, however, when I wrote this the first time, I wrote it like this, which is a very different sequence of operations:

def compareOp(op : (Int, Int) => Boolean) =
{
    checkStack(2)
    def v1 = (execStack.pop()).asInstanceOf[Int]
    def v2 = (execStack.pop()).asInstanceOf[Int]
    def vr = op(v1, v2)
    execStack.push(if (vr) 1 else 0)
}

See the difference? Subtle, is it not? But the actual code is significantly different, something that's more easily seen with a much simpler (and standalone) example:

object App
{
    def main(args : Array[String]) =
    {
        import scala.collection.mutable.Stack
        var stack : Stack[Any] = new Stack()
        stack.push(12)
        stack.push(24)
        def v1 = (stack.pop()).asInstanceOf[Int]
        def v2 = (stack.pop()).asInstanceOf[Int]
        def vr = v1 + v2
        System.out.println(vr)
    }
} 

When run, the console prints out "36", as we'd well expect.

But suppose we want to look at those values of v1 and v2 along the way, perhaps as part of a logging operation, or perhaps because you're just screwing around with some ideas in your head and you don't want to bother to fire up an IDE with Scala support in it. So you decide to spit those values to a console:

object App
{
    def main(args : Array[String]) =
    {
        import scala.collection.mutable.Stack
        var stack : Stack[Any] = new Stack()
        stack.push(12)
        stack.push(24)
        def v1 = (stack.pop()).asInstanceOf[Int]
        def v2 = (stack.pop()).asInstanceOf[Int]
        System.out.println(v1)
        System.out.println(v2)
        def vr = v1 + v2
        System.out.println(vr)
    }
} 

And then something *very* different happens; you get "24", "12", and then a NoSuchElementException.

If you're like me the first time I ran into this, your first reaction is, "Eh?". Actually, if you're like me, when you're programming, your profanity filters are probaby at an ebb, so your first reaction is "WTF?!?", said with great gusto and emphasis. Which has a tendency to get some strange looks when you're at a Denny's doing your research, I will admit. Particularly when it's at 3 AM in the morning. And the bar crowd is in full alcoholic haze and slightly nervous about the long-haired, goatee-sporting guy in his headphones, wearing his black leather jacket and swearing like a drunken sailor at his laptop. But I digress.

What is Scala doing here?

Turns out this is exactly as the language designers intended, but it's subtle. (Or maybe it's just subtle to me at 3AM when I'm pumped full of caffeine.)

Let's take this a different way:

object App
{
    def main(args : Array[String]) =
    {
        import scala.collection.mutable.Stack
        var stack : Stack[Any] = new Stack()
        stack.push(12)
        stack.push(24)
        def v1 = (stack.pop()).asInstanceOf[Int]
        def v2 = (stack.pop()).asInstanceOf[Int]
        System.out.println(stack)
    }
} 

When run, the console prints "Stack(12, 24)", which *really* starts to play with your mind when you're a little short on sleep and a little high on Diet Coke. At first glance, it looks like Scala is broken somehow--after all, those "pop" operations are supposed to modify the Stack against which they're operating, just as the push()es do. So why is the stack convinced that it still holds the values of 12 and 24?

Because Scala hasn't actually executed those pop()s yet.

The "def" keyword, it turns out, isn't what I wanted here--what I wanted (and in retrospect it’s painfully obvious) was a "val", instead, in order to force the execution of those statements and capture the value into a local value (an immutable local variable). The "def" keyword, instead, creates a function binding that waits for formal execution before evaluating. So that when I previously said

object App
{
    def main(args : Array[String]) =
    {
        import scala.collection.mutable.Stack
        var stack : Stack[Any] = new Stack()
        stack.push(12)
        stack.push(24)
        def v1 = (stack.pop()).asInstanceOf[Int]
        def v2 = (stack.pop()).asInstanceOf[Int]
        def vr = v1 + v2
        System.out.println(vr)
    }
} 

… what in fact I was saying was this:

object App
{
    def main(args : Array[String]) =
    {
        import scala.collection.mutable.Stack
        var stack : Stack[Any] = new Stack()
        stack.push(12)
        stack.push(24)
        def v1 = (stack.pop()).asInstanceOf[Int]
        def v2 = (stack.pop()).asInstanceOf[Int]
        System.out.println(v1 + v2)
    }
} 

… which is the same as:

object App
{
    def main(args : Array[String]) =
    {
        import scala.collection.mutable.Stack
        var stack : Stack[Any] = new Stack()
        stack.push(12)
        stack.push(24)
        System.out.println((stack.pop()).asInstanceOf[Int] + (stack.pop()).asInstanceOf[Int])
    }
} 

… which, when we look back at my most recent "debugging" version of the code, substituting the "def"ed versions of v1 and v2 (and vr) where they're used, makes the reason for the NoSuchElementException become entirely more clear:

object App
{
    def main(args : Array[String]) =
    {
        import scala.collection.mutable.Stack
        var stack : Stack[Any] = new Stack()
        stack.push(12)
        stack.push(24)
        System.out.println((stack.pop()).asInstanceOf[Int])
        System.out.println((stack.pop()).asInstanceOf[Int])
        System.out.println((stack.pop()).asInstanceOf[Int] + (stack.pop()).asInstanceOf[Int])
    }
} 

Now, normally, this would probably set off all kinds of alarm bells in your head, but the reaction that went off in mine was "COOL!", the reasons for which revolve around the concept of "laziness"; in a functional language, we frequently don't want to evaluate the results right away, instead preferring to defer their execution until actually requiring it. In fact, many functional languages—such as Haskell—take laziness to new heights, baking it directly into the language definition and assuming laziness everywhere, so much so that you have to take special steps to avoid it. There’s a variety of reasons why this is advantageous, but I’ll leave those discussions to the Haskellians of the world, like Matt Podwysocki and Simon Peyton-Jones.

From a Scalist’s perspective, laziness is still a useful tool to have in your toolbox. Suppose you have a really powerful function that calculates PI to a ridiculous number of decimal places. In Java, you might be tempted to do something like this:

class MyMath
{
  public static final double PI = calculatePiToARidiculousNumberOfPlaces();
  private static double calculatePiToARidiculousNumberOfPlaces()
  {
    // implementation left to the reader's imagination
    // imagine it being "really cool"
  }
} 

The problem with this is that if that method takes any length of time to execute, it's being done during class initialization during its ClassLoading phase, and aside from introducing a window of time where the class *could* be used before that initialization is finished (it's subtle, it's not going to happen very often, but it can, according to older versions of the JVM Spec), the problem is that the time required to do that initialization is paid for *regardless of whether you use PI*. In other words, the classic Stroustrup-ian "Don't pay for it if you don't use it" principle is being completely tossed aside.

In Scala, using the "def" keyword here, aside from avoiding the need for the additional decorators, completely eliminates this cost--people won't need the value of PI until it becomes used:

object App
{
    def PI = calculatePiToARidiculousNumberOfPlaces()
    def calculatePiToARidiculousNumberOfPlaces() =
    {
        System.out.println("Calculating PI")
        3 + 0.14
    }
    def main(args : Array[String]) =
    {
        System.out.println("Entering main")
        System.out.println("PI = " + PI)
    }
} 

(In fact, you'd probably just write it without the calculating method definition, since it's easier that way, but bear with me.)

When you run this, of course, we see PI being calculated after main()'s been entered, thus proving that PI is being calculated only on demand, not ahead of time, as a public-static-final-constant would be.

The problem with this approach is, you end up calculating PI on each access:

object App
{
    def PI = calculatePiToARidiculousNumberOfPlaces()
    def calculatePiToARidiculousNumberOfPlaces() =
    {
        System.out.println("Calculating PI")
        3 + 0.14
    }
    def main(args : Array[String]) =
    {
        System.out.println("Entering main")
        System.out.println("PI = " + PI)
        System.out.println("PI = " + PI)
            // prints twice! Not good!
    }
} 

Which sort of defeats the advantage of lazy evaluation.

This got me wondering--in F#, we have lazy as a baked-in concept (sort of), such that when I write

#light
let sixty = lazy (30 + 30)
System.Console.WriteLine(sixty) 

What I see on the console is not 60, but a Lazy<T> type instance, which effectively defers execution until it's Force() method is invoked (among other scenarios). This means I can write things like

let reallyBigList = lazy ([1..1000000000000] |> complexCalculation |> anotherComplexCalcuation)

without fear of blowing the stack or heap apart, since laziness means the list won't actually be calculated until it's forced; we can see this from the following (from the F# interactive console):

> let sixtyWithSideEffect = lazy (printfn "Hello world"; 30+30);;
val sixtyWithSideEffect: Lazy<int>
> sixtyWithSideEffect.Force();;
Hello world
val it : int = 60
> sixtyWithSideEffect.Force();;
val it : int = 60 

(Examples taken from the excellent Expert F# by Syme/Granicz/Cisternino; highly recommended, if a touch out-of-date to the current language definition. I expect Chris Smith’s Programming F#, from O’Reilly, to correct that before too long.)

It would be nice if something similar were doable in Scala. Of course, once I start looking for it, it makes itself visible, in the wonderful Venners/Odersky/Spoon book, Programming In Scala, p. 444:

You can use pre-initialized fields to simulate precisely the initialization behavior
of class constructor arguments. Sometimes, however, you might prefer
to let the system itself sort out how things should be initialized. This can
be achieved by making your val definitions lazy. If you prefix a val definition
with a lazy modifier, the initializing expression on the right-hand side
will only be evaluated the first time the val is used.

[...]

This is similar to the situation where x is defined as a parameterless
method, using a def. However, unlike a def a lazy val is never evaluated
more than once. In fact, after the first evaluation of a lazy val the result of the
evaluation is stored, to be reused when the same val is used subsequently.

Perfect! The key, then, is to define PI like so:

object App
{
    lazy val PI = calculatePiToARidiculousNumberOfPlaces()
    def calculatePiToARidiculousNumberOfPlaces() =
    {
        System.out.println("Calculating PI")
        3 + 0.14
    }
    def main(args : Array[String]) =
    {
        System.out.println("Entering main")
        System.out.println("PI = " + PI)
        System.out.println("PI = " + PI)
            // prints once! Awesome!
    }
} 

That means, if I apply it to my Stack example from before, I should get the same deferred-execution properties of the "def"-based version ...

def main(args : Array[String]) =
{
    import scala.collection.mutable.Stack
    var stack : Stack[Any] = new Stack()
    stack.push(12)
    stack.push(24)
    lazy val v1 = (stack.pop()).asInstanceOf[Int]
    lazy val v2 = (stack.pop()).asInstanceOf[Int]
    System.out.println(stack)
        // prints out "Stack(12,24)
} 

... but if I go back to the version that blows up because the stack is empty, using lazy val works exactly the way I would want it to:

def main(args : Array[String]) =
{
    import scala.collection.mutable.Stack
    var stack : Stack[Any] = new Stack()
    stack.push(12)
    stack.push(24)
    lazy val v1 = (stack.pop()).asInstanceOf[Int]
    lazy val v2 = (stack.pop()).asInstanceOf[Int]
    System.out.println(v1)
    System.out.println(v2)
    lazy val vr = v1 + v2
    System.out.println(vr)
        // prints 12, 24, then 36
        // and no exception!
} 

Nice.

So, it turns out that my accidental use of "def" inside the compareOp function behaves exactly the way the language designers wanted it to, which is not surprising, and that Scala provides nifty abilities to defer processing or extraction of values until called for.

Curiously, the two languages differ in how laziness is implemented; in F#, the lazy modifier defines the type to be a Lazy<T> instance, an ordinary type that we can pass around from F# to C# and back again as necessary (in much the same way that C# defined nullable types to be instances of Nullable<T> under the hood). We can see that from the interactive console output above, and from the fact that we call Force() on the instance to evaluate its value.

In Scala, however, there is no corresponding Lazy[T] type; instead, the PI() method is defined to determine whether or not the value has already been evaluated:

public double PI();
  Code:
   0:   aload_0
   1:   getfield        #135; //Field bitmap$0:I
   4:   iconst_1
   5:   iand
   6:   iconst_0
   7:   if_icmpne       48
   10:  aload_0
   11:  dup
   12:  astore_1
   13:  monitorenter
   14:  aload_0
   15:  getfield        #135; //Field bitmap$0:I
   18:  iconst_1
   19:  iand
   20:  iconst_0
   21:  if_icmpne       42
   24:  aload_0
   25:  aload_0
   26:  invokevirtual   #137; //Method calculatePiToARidiculousNumberOfPlaces:()D
   29:  putfield        #139; //Field PI:D
   32:  aload_0
   33:  aload_0
   34:  getfield        #135; //Field bitmap$0:I
   37:  iconst_1
   38:  ior
   39:  putfield        #135; //Field bitmap$0:I
   42:  getstatic       #145; //Field scala/runtime/BoxedUnit.UNIT:Lscala/runtime/BoxedUnit;
   45:  pop
   46:  aload_1
   47:  monitorexit
   48:  aload_0
   49:  getfield        #139; //Field PI:D
   52:  dreturn
   53:  aload_1
   54:  monitorexit
   55:  athrow
  Exception table:
   from   to  target type
    14    48    53   any

If you look carefully at the bytecode, the implementation of PI is checking a bitmask field (!) to determine if the first bit is flipped (!) to know whether or not the value is held in the local field PI, and if not, calculate it and store it there. This means that Java developers will just need to call PI() over and over again, rather than have to know that the instance is actually a Lazy[T] on which they need to call Value or Force (such as one would from C# in the F# case). Frankly, I don’t know at this point which approach I prefer, but I’m slightly leaning towards the Scala version for now. (If only Java supported properties, then the syntax “MyMath.PI” would look like a constant, act lazily, and everything would be great.)

(It strikes me that the F# developer looking to write something C#-accessible need only tuck the Lazy<T> instance behind a property accessor and the problem goes away, by the way; it would just be nicer to not have to do anything special on either side, to have my laziness and Force() it, too. Pipe dream, perhaps.)

In retrospect, I could wish that Scala weren't *quite* so subtle in its treatment of "def" vs "val", but now that I'm aware of it, it'll (hopefully) not bite me quite so subtly in the sensitive spots of my anatomy again.

And any experience in which you learn something is a good one, right?

An interesting blog post was forwarded to me by another of my fellow ThoughtWorkers, which suggests a new software stack for building an enterprise system, acronymized as “JOSH”:

The Book Of JOSH

Through a marvelous, even devious, set of circumstances, I'm presented with the opportunity to address my little problem without proscribed constraints, a true green field opportunity.

Json OSGi Scala HTTP

Json delivers on what XML promised. Simple to understand, effective data markup accessible and usable by human and computer alike. Serialization/Deserialization is on par with or faster then XML, Thrift and Protocol Buffers. Sure I'm losing XSD Schema type checking, SOAP and WS-* standardization. I'm taking that trade.

OSGi a standardized dynamic, modular framework for versioned components and services. Pick a logger component, a HTTP server component, a ??? component, add your own internal components and you have a dedicated application solution. Micro deployment with true replacement. What am I giving up? The monolithic J2EE application servlet loaded with 25 frameworks, SCA and XML configuration hell. Taking the trade.

HTTP is simple, effective, fast enough, and widely supported. I'm tired of needlessly complex and endless proprietary protocols to move simple data from A to B with all the accompanying firewall port insanity. Yes, HTTP is not perfect. But I'm taking this trade where I can as well.

All interfaces will be simple REST inspired APIs based on HTTP+JSON. This is an immediate consequence of the JOSH stack.

Scala is by far the toughest, yet the easiest selection in the JOSH stack. I wrestled far more with the JSON or XML or Thrift or Protocol Buffers decision.

And, let’s be honest, the stack sounds a lot better than what he was working with before....

[...] Yes, you see, I have a small problem.

So whats the issue, you say? I write a whole blog about nothing, you say? We all know the right answer, you're pointing out? Yea, I know, its intuitively obvious to the casual observer.

We'll rewrite it from scratch.

Course we'll need a cluster of WebSphere Application Servers, and an Oracle RAC cluster for all that data. Don't forget the middleware needed to transition over from the legacy systems, so toss in an ESB cluster, and what heck a couple of BPEL servers too.

Need a SOA Center of Excellence of course too. Can't integrate without some common XML Business Object Schemas. Also need to roll the Rational RUP suite and some beefy IDE environments and for that shiny look, sprinkle the works with lots of WS-* sparkly dust. Bake 3-5 years or until done, whenever.

My presentation slides for all this will be killer. I can sell this stuff. I'm good at it. I'll look like a bloody genius. I'll have Vendors fawning all over me. And the best part is the bubble on this mess won't pop for YEARS, when I'll have plenty of plausible deniability. "Hey the plan was perfect, the business, IT managers and their people were incapable of executing it."

I feel like the enterprise IT equivalent of an AIG trader pocketing ill gotten gains from writing Credit Default Swaps that we can't pay off.

Ewww... even thinking about all that makes me want to go upstairs, step into the shower, turn the water as hot as it will go, and wash. Scrub my skin raw with soap and sponge until the top five layers of epidermis are gone, and still not feel clean.

On the surface of things, the stack sounds pretty good. OSGi is a pretty solid spec for managing versioning and modularity within a running Java system, and more importantly, it’s well-known, relatively reliable, and pretty well-proven to handle the classic problems well. And of course, anybody who knows me knows that I’m a fan of the Scala language as a potential complement or supplement to the Java programming language, so that’s hardly in debate.

But there are a few concerns. JSON is a simple wire protocol, granted, but that is both a good thing and a bad thing (it’s object-centric, for one, and will run into some of the same issues as objects do with certain relationships), and it lacks the ubiquity that XML provides. Granted, XML clearly suffered from an overabundance of adoption, but it still doesn’t take away the fact that ubiquity is really necessary if you’re building a baseline for something that will talk to a variety of different systems. Which, I admit, may not be in his list of requirements, I don’t know. And HTTP is great for long-haul, client-initiated communication, but it definitely has its limitations (which he acknowledges, openly, to his credit), at least to internal-facing consumers. There is no peer for external-facing consumers, that’s a given.

And the stack is clearly also missing something else...

The JOSH stack is lacking a letter, because a solution for persisted data is missing in the stack.

A great deal of what needs to be done does not require a ACID RDB cluster. Some of it does and I'm kicking that can down the road.

For the rest, either the data is ReadOnly and loaded a 1-3 times a day or is best persisted by a distributed Key-Value storage system. A number of these are now available as open source solutions and at the right moment I'll need to pick one and add that letter to the JOSH stack.

As a commenter suggested, CouchDB might be a solution here, or I’ll even throw db4o into the ring for discussion as an option. Again, it’ll depend on how far-and-wide the data will be seen by other systems—the more other systems need to see it, the less further away from a “regular” RDBMS we can go.

Certainly, it’s a great start for discussion, even if the acronym is likely to give those named Joshua an unhealthy ego boost.

Part of me wonders, though... what would the equivalent on .NET look like? JSON + Assemblies + F# + HTTP = JAFH?

This crossed my Inbox:

I read your article entitled: The Polyglot Programmer. How about the thought that rather than becoming a polyglot-software engineer; pick a polyglot-language. For example, C# is borrowing techniques from functional and dynamic languages. Let the compiler designer worry about mixing features and software engineers worry about keep up with the mixture. Is this a good approach? [From Phil, at http://greensoftwareengineer.spaces.live.com/]

Phil, it’s an interesting thought you’ve raised—which is the better/easier approach to take, that of incorporating the language features we want into a single language, rather than needing to learn all those different languages (and their own unique syntaxes) in order to take advantage of those features we want?

After all, we’re starting to see this taking place within a certain number of languages already, particularly C#; first, in 3.0, they introduced a number of features in support of LINQ that make C# a useful starting point for working with a functional language. Extension methods, for example, allow us to add a number of different methods to the collection classes that provide some functional capabilities (Select<>, GroupBy<>, and so on), as Matt Podwysocki demonstrates, generics contribute the type-safety that most functional languages embrace, anonymous methods and delegates provide better functions-as-first-class-constructs (including lambdas), and anonymous types make it vastly easier to return and pass tuples. And now, in 4.0, we’re getting the “dynamic” keyword, which will add support for invoking methods and properties dynamically, in the grand tradition of most dynamic languages (like Python and Ruby), and 3.0’s local variable type inference allows us to write “var x = ...”, which feels pretty dynamic (even if it’s not, under the hood).

Unfortunately, I think for the most part, the answer’s going to be, “Yes, it would be nice, if it weren’t for the fact that there are very few languages that won’t collapse underneath their own weight if they did so.”

Consider, for example, the C# language. Already, with the C# 3.0 definition, the language specification weighs in at close to a thousand pages. The additional features in 4.0 could easily push it over a thousand and possibly, with all the places where “dynamic” behavior will need to be factored into the existing specification, could push that well into the 1200 to 1300 page range. What’s the upper limit on a language’s complexity to maintain and enhance, much less for its programmers to comprehend?

(By comparison, the C++ specification, as I can best remember, didn’t weigh in at more than a thousand pages, but given that the current working draft is under password protection, and I can’t find the prior spec as a freely-available download, I can’t see if memory is correct or not.)

Or, consider the various edge cases that came up around the introduction of nullable types in C# 2.0. What started out as a fairly simple suggestion—“let’s let T? represent the idea that this instance of T could be nullable, and at runtime it’ll be a Nullable<T> instance behind the scenes”—turned into a pretty ugly morass of edge cases at the language level that resulted in some serious bug-fixing right up until the final ship date.

Thing is, languages that aren’t written deliberately to allow their own modification and evolution tend to fail over time. C++ was one such example, and I think both Java and C# will stand as successor examples before long.

Right now, in C# 3.0, type inference is limited entirely to local variables because the language isn’t syntactically set up to leave out type names wherever possible—the “var” token is a type placeholder, largely because the parser has to have a type first. (This is the same purpose the “dynamic” keyword seems to be playing for 4.0, though I can’t say so for certain.) In F# and Scala, this syntax is deliberately written Pascal-style, with the name first, optionally followed by a colon and the type, because the parser can see the colon and realize the type is already specified, or see no colon and realize the type should be inferred. That syntax is used consistently throughout the F# and Scala languages, and that means it’s pretty easy, lexically speaking, for the languages to recognize when type inference should kick in.

What’s more, both F# and Scala don’t really support the O-O notion of method overloading, because again, it gets confusing when trying to kick in type inference—something about too many possibilities confusing the type-inferencer. (I’m not entirely positive of this point, by the way, it’s based on some conversations I’ve had with language designers over the last few years. I could be wrong, and would love to see a language that supports both.) Instead, they force developers to be more explicit about parameters being passed—F# won’t even do implicit widening conversions, in fact, such as automatically widening ints to longs.

But both F# and Scala have a very interesting facility to allow definitions of methods/functions using very flexible syntactic rules, such that they look like operators or keywords built into the language; F# defines its pipeline operator ( |> ) in its library definitions, for example. Scala defines numerous “keywords”, like synchronized or transient, as classes in the Scala package extending “StaticAnnotation”—in other words, their syntax and behavior is defined as an annotation, rather than as a built-in part of the language. Ditto for Scala’s XML support.

Lisp, of course, was one of the first (if not the first) language to do this, and it’s my understanding that this has been one of the principal reasons it has survived all these years as a language—because it’s an abstraction built on top of an abstraction built on top of an abstraction, et al, it makes it easier to change those underlying abstractions when the context changes.

This doesn’t mean those “polyactivist” languages like C# are bad things, it just means that there’s a danger that they’ll eventually collapse from too many moving parts all trying to talk to each other at the same time. As an exercise, open the C# 3.0 spec, and start checking off all the sections that will need to be touched by the introduction of the “dynamic” keyword as a new type.

Or, to put it analagously, yes, for a lot of work, a single multifunction tool can be useful, but for a lot of other work, you want tools that are specialized to the task at hand. Let’s not minimize the usefulness of that multifunction tool, but let’s not try to use a Swiss Army knife where a jeweler’s screwdriver is really needed.

This email crossed my Inbox last week while I was on the road:

Due to the current economic situation, TechWeb has made the difficult decision to discontinue the Software Development events, including SD West, SD Best Practices and Architecture & Design World. We are grateful for your support during SD's twenty-four year history and are disappointed to see the events end.

This really bums me out, because the SD shows were some of the best shows I’ve been to, particularly SD West, which always had a great cross-cutting collection of experts from all across the industry’s big technical areas: C++, Java, .NET, security, agile, and more. It was also where I got to meet and interview Bjarne Stroustrup, a personal hero of mine from back in my days as a C++ developer, where I got to hang out each year with Scott Meyers, another personal hero (and now a good friend) as well as editor on Effective Enterprise Java, and Mike Cohn, another good friend as well as a great guy to work for. It was where I first met Gary McGraw, in a rather embarrassing fashion—in the middle of his presentation on security, my cell phone went off with a klaxon alarm ring tone loud enough to be heard throughout the entire room, and as every head turned to look at me, he commented dryly, “That’s the buffer overrun alarm—somewhere in the world, a buffer overrun attack is taking place.”

On a positive note, however, the email goes on to say that “Cloud Connect [will] take over SD West's dates in March 2010 at the Santa Clara Convention Center”, which is good news, since it means (hopefully) that I’ll still get a chance to make my yearly pilgrimage to In-N-Out....

Rest in peace, SD. You will be missed.

Just got this email from Chris Sells:

For twelve 45-minute slots at this year’s DSL DevCon (April 16-17 in Redmond, WA), we had 49 proposals. You have been selected as speakers for the following talks. Please confirm that you’ll be there for both days so that I can put together the schedule and post it on the conference site. This DevCon should rock. Thanks!

Martin Fowler - Keynote

Paul Vick + Gio - Mgrammar Deep Dive

Tom Rodgers - Domain Specific Languages for automated testing of equity order management systems and trading machines

Paul Cowan - DSLs in the Horn Package Manager

Guillaume Laforge - How to implement DSLs with Groovy

Markus Voelter - Eclipse tooling for Model-Driven stuff

Dionysios G. Synodinos - JavaScript DSLs for the Client Side

Ted Neward, Bradford Cross - Functional vs. Dynamic DSLs: The Smackdown

Gilad Bracha - embedding EBNF in a general purpose language

Umit Yalcinalp, Tilman Giese - RUMBA: RUby Managed Business data for Applications

Bob Archer - A DSL for Cool Effects in Adobe Pixel Blender

Chance Coble - Language Oriented Programming in F#

As my 15-year-old son Michael has grown fond of saying... w00t! The list of topics is fascinating, and I'm really looking forward to most, if not all, of them. Chance's talk on LOP in F# should be good, I'm really curious to see Gilad's discussion of EBNF (and wondering if this is Newspeak we'll be seeing), and Guillaume is always fun to watch when he's going on about Groovy. Of course, I'm also excited to be paired up with Brad, who's an insanely smart guy--I have a feeling I'll learn a lot just by standing next to him. (Sort of a speakers' osmosis.)

If you're not planning to be here for this (and the Lang.NET Symposium), either you have life-saving surgery scheduled that can't be pushed back, or you're clearly not interested in DSLs. For your own sake, I hope it's the latter.

Seriously, come for the full week. The Lang.NET Symposium last year was an amazing event, for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it saw Sun celebrities John Rose, Charlie Nutter and Brian Goetz step on to the Microsoft campus, deliver a great presentation on the JVM, MLVM/invokedynamic, and JRuby, and get good feedback and discussion from Microsoft engineers and other notables. You don't get to see that every day.

Answer: "I don't know, but I'm damn well going to find out!"

(Now I really wish I were in London. Ah, well, will just have to go see Ward Cunningham speak at Alt.NET Seattle, instead.)

Matt Podwysocki makes it all clear:

Hey, I'd have learned Haskell a LONG time ago if I'd known it could yield up a beer!

Last year I had the opportunity to return to the land of my roots, Poland, and speak at Java Developer Days (JDD). Just today, the organizers from JDD sent me a link with a nice little photo montage from the conference. (I did notice a few photos from the after-party were selectively left out of the montage, however, which is probably a good thing because that was the first time I'd ever met a Polish Mad Dog, and boy did they all go down easy...)

If you're anywhere in the area around Krakow in March, you definitely should swing by for their follow-up conference, 4Developers--it sounds like it's going to be another fun event, and this time it's going to reach out to more than just the Java folks, but also the .NET crowd (and a few others), as well.

(I don't really expect any of the readers of this blog living outside Poland to really pack up and head over to Krakow for a weekend, mind you, but if you're a technology speaker and you're interested in hanging with an extremely good group of people, the people who put these shows on--ProIdea--are top-notch, take great care of the speakers, and overall make the entire experience well worth the trip.)

Because I’m about to start my third part in the WCF/F# series, I realized that I’ve now hit the “rule of three” mark: in this particular case, this will mark the third project I’m creating that unifies WCF and F#, and frankly, it’s a pain in the *ss to do it all by hand each time: create an F# Library, add the System.ServiceModel and System.Runtime.Serialization assemblies, go create an App.config file and add it to the project as an Existing Item…. Painful.

So… as a brief interlude, I decided to go re-acquaint myself with the Visual Studio project template system, and sure enough, it’s basically what I remember: a collection of files with some template-style functionality, bundled into a .zip file and stored in the Visual Studio directory, under <VSDir>\Common7\IDE\ProjectTemplates. What was new to me, however, was the highly useful “File | Export Template…” menu option, allowing me to take an existing F#/WCF project and use it as a template to create the .zip bundle. (Naturally, I didn’t discover this until I’d built the silly thing by hand.)

Sara Ford has more on creating a VS template on her Visual Studio Tools blog/column, number 336 to be precise. (You should read all of them, by the way—start with #1 and work your way there. When you’re done, you’ll have a much better appreciation of everything Visual Studio can do, and you’ll be able to find a ton of ways to save yourself and your team some time and effort.)

You can always take a .zip bundle like this and drop it into the Visual Studio 2008 “My Exported Templates” directory, but quite frankly, I didn’t want that. I wanted my template to appear in a subcategory of Visual F# in the New Project dialog box, under “WCF”, just as the C# versions do. The easiest way to do this is to manually create the “WCF” directory (full path thus being <VSDir>\Common7\IDE\ProjectTemplates\FSharp\WCF), and drop the .zip file there. Note that if you restart Visual Studio at this point, you won’t see the new template; it builds a cache of the .zip templates in a sister directory (ProjectTemplatesCache), so instead, you have to tell Visual Studio to reset that cache by firing “devenv /setup” from the command-line. (This will require admin privileges, by the way.)

After that, you have an F#/WCF project template, and you’re good to go.

If you’ve not read the first part in the series, take a look there first.

While it’s always easier to build WCF services with nothing but primitive types understood by all the platforms to which you’re communicating (be it Java through XML services or other .NET systems via WCF’s more efficient binding types), this gets old and limiting very quickly. The WCF service author will want to develop whole composite types that can be exchanged across the wire, and this is most often done via the DataContract attribute applied to the types that will be exchanged.

In Michele Leroux Bustamente’s Learning WCF examples, this is covered in Chapter #2, and the corresponding code I’m using as a basis for conversion to F# is in Labs\Chapter2\DataContracts_Part1.

One notable difference between this example and the previous one is that the type definitions are stored in a separate assembly, ContentTypes.dll. There’s two basic choices to use here: one, to use the C# types as defined, from a service written in F#, or two, to define the types in F# and use them from the service. A third choice, defining the types in F# and using them from C#, also presents itself, but is uninteresting to us from a purely instructional standpoint—if you know how to write C#, then you can take the types defined in F# and use them just as you would have the C# types.

For instructional purposes, I’m going to take the second approach: I’m first going to convert the ContentTypes.dll assembly over to F#, again to show how to create types in F# that are structurally equivalent to the types defined in C#, since that’s something that has changed since Nick Holmes blogged about this last year), then I’m going to flip the service over to F# as well.

Defining the Data Types

The first step, for many service authors, is to define the interfaces for the service(s) and the types that will be exchanged; in this case, since I’m building from Michele’s example, these have already been defined as:

   1: using System;

   2: using System.ServiceModel;

   3: using System.Runtime.Serialization;

   4:  

   5: namespace ContentTypes

   6: {

   7:     

   8:    [DataContract(Namespace="http://schemas.thatindigogirl.com/samples/2006/06")]

   9:     public class LinkItem

  10:     {

  11:  

  12:         [DataMember(Name = "Id", IsRequired = false, Order = 0)]

  13:         private long m_id;

  14:         [DataMember(Name = "Title", IsRequired = true, Order = 1)]

  15:         private string m_title;

  16:         [DataMember(Name = "Description", IsRequired = true, Order = 2)]

  17:         private string m_description;

  18:         [DataMember(Name = "DateStart", IsRequired = true, Order = 3)]

  19:         private DateTime m_dateStart;

  20:         [DataMember(Name = "DateEnd", IsRequired = false, Order = 4)]

  21:         private DateTime m_dateEnd;

  22:         [DataMember(Name = "Url", IsRequired = false, Order = 5)]

  23:         private string m_url;

  24:  

  25:         public DateTime DateStart

  26:         {

  27:             get { return m_dateStart; }

  28:             set { m_dateStart = value; }

  29:         } 

  30:  

  31:         public DateTime DateEnd

  32:         {

  33:             get { return m_dateEnd; }

  34:             set { m_dateEnd = value; }

  35:         }

  36:        

  37:         public string Url

  38:         {

  39:             get { return m_url; }

  40:             set { m_url = value; }

  41:         }

  42:         

  43:         public long Id

  44:         {

  45:             get { return m_id; }

  46:             set { m_id = value; }

  47:         }

  48:  

  49:         public string Title

  50:         {

  51:             get { return m_title; }

  52:             set { m_title = value; }

  53:         }

  54:  

  55:         public string Description

  56:         {

  57:             get { return m_description; }

  58:             set { m_description = value; }

  59:         }

  60:     }

  61: }

Note that now, in a C#3-friendly world, we can slim the definition of the LinkItem down to a much smaller level thanks to the power of automatic properties:

   1: using System;

   2: using System.ServiceModel;

   3: using System.Runtime.Serialization;

   4:  

   5: namespace ContentTypes

   6: {    

   7:     [DataContract(Namespace="http://schemas.thatindigogirl.com/samples/2006/06")]

   8:     public class LinkItem

   9:     {

  10:         [DataMember(Name = "Id", IsRequired = false, Order = 0)]

  11:         public long Id { get; set; }

  12:         [DataMember(Name = "Title", IsRequired = true, Order = 1)]

  13:         public string Title { get; set; }

  14:         [DataMember(Name = "Description", IsRequired = true, Order = 2)]

  15:         public string Description { get; set; }

  16:         [DataMember(Name = "DateStart", IsRequired = true, Order = 3)]

  17:         public DateTime DateStart { get; set; }

  18:         [DataMember(Name = "DateEnd", IsRequired = false, Order = 4)]

  19:         public DateTime DateEnd { get; set; }

  20:         [DataMember(Name = "Url", IsRequired = false, Order = 5)]

  21:         public string Url { get; set; }

  22:     }

  23: }

… but either way, the type ends up looking the same. Converting this over to F# is relatively easy, if not any shorter or more convenient than the C# 3.0 version, owing to the fact that, by default, F# will not generate mutable properties by default:

   1: #light

   2:  

   3: namespace ContentTypes

   4:     

   5: open System

   6: open System.Runtime.Serialization

   7: open System.ServiceModel

   8:  

   9: [<DataContract(Namespace="http://schemas.thatindigogirl.com/samples/2006/06")>]

  10: type LinkItem() =

  11:     let mutable id : int64 = 0L

  12:     let mutable title : string = String.Empty

  13:     let mutable description : string = String.Empty

  14:     let mutable dateStart : DateTime = DateTime.Now

  15:     let mutable dateEnd : DateTime = DateTime.Now

  16:     let mutable url : string = String.Empty

  17:  

  18:     [<DataMember(Name = "Id", IsRequired = false, Order = 0)>]

  19:     member public l.Id

  20:         with get() = id

  21:         and set(value) = id <- value

  22:     [<DataMember(Name = "Title", IsRequired = true, Order = 1)>]

  23:     member public l.Title

  24:         with get() = title

  25:         and set(value) = title <- value

  26:     [<DataMember(Name = "Description", IsRequired = true, Order = 2)>]

  27:     member public l.Description

  28:         with get() = description

  29:         and set(value) = description <- value

  30:     [<DataMember(Name = "DateStart", IsRequired = true, Order = 3)>]

  31:     member public l.DateStart

  32:         with get() = dateStart

  33:         and set(value) = dateStart <- value

  34:     [<DataMember(Name = "DateEnd", IsRequired = false, Order = 4)>]

  35:     member public l.DateEnd

  36:         with get() = dateEnd

  37:         and set(value) = dateEnd <- value

  38:     [<DataMember(Name = "Url", IsRequired = false, Order = 5)>]

  39:     member public l.Url

  40:         with get() = url

  41:         and set(value) = url <- value

Notice that I have to create a mutable backing field, and define the properties in the F# LinkItem type to explicitly access and mutate those values. This is a bit frustrating, because it seems like F# should be able to infer what I want from a simple property declaration, in the same way that C# can, but perhaps that’s asking too much from the language right now, considering the silly thing hasn’t even shipped yet.

(Psssst, Luke, Don, if you’re listening, automatic property generation in F# would be a nifty feature to add between now and then, if you guys can ninja it in there before the next CTP…)

Notice, by the way, the namespace directive at the top of the F# code; this is necessary to set the prefix around the LinkItem type. Without it, remember, the F# code is going to be slipped inside an outer class declaration matching the filename, effectively naming the class Module1+LinkItem, which would not be structurally equivalent to the C# type.

Lesson #4: Always put a namespace or module declaration around the types exported from a service.

Notice that LinkItem also has a default constructor, as per Lesson #2; this is necessary because the DataContract-related code inside of WCF is going to need to be able to construct one of these and set its properties. If we want to set any reasonable defaults, that’s easily done in the mutable member definitions.

One principal difference between the F# version and the C# version is that the DataMember attributes are applied to the properties, instead of the fields, largely because the F# language wants to keep a layer of encapsulation between the code you write as an F# programmer, and the actual code generated. So, for example, the “field” id, above, doesn’t actually get generated exactly as described—in truth, it turns into a field called “id@11”. This is a marked difference from C# (or even VB), which deliberately gives us more control over how the physical structure of classes looks. This is even more obvious in a basic F# program where a top-level declaration reads, “let x = 12”; where it might be tempting to assume that x will be a static field on the class surrounding the declaration, the F# compiler actually generates a property.

In this particular case, whether the attribute applies to the fields or the property declarations isn’t going to make a large difference, but in more sophisticated classes, it might, so it’s better to apply the attribute to the property and not the field, at least, from what I’ve found so far.

Lesson #5: Put DataMember attributes on the properties of the DataContract, not the fields.

Defining the Service

The definition of the service is actually pretty straightforward. Add either the C# ContentTypes.dll or the F# ContentTypes.dll as an assembly reference, and where the C# code (GigManagerService.cs) reads:

   1: using System;

   2: using System.Collections.Generic;

   3: using System.Text;

   4: using System.ServiceModel;

   5: using ContentTypes;

   6:  

   7: namespace GigManager

   8: {

   9:     [ServiceContract(Name = "GigManagerServiceContract", Namespace = "http://www.thatindigogirl.com/samples/2006/06", SessionMode = SessionMode.Required)]

  10:     public interface IGigManagerService

  11:     {

  12:         [OperationContract]

  13:         void SaveGig(LinkItem item);

  14:  

  15:         [OperationContract]

  16:         LinkItem GetGig();

  17:     }

  18:  

  19:     [ServiceBehavior(InstanceContextMode = InstanceContextMode.PerSession)]

  20:     public class GigManagerService : IGigManagerService

  21:     {

  22:  

  23:         private LinkItem m_linkItem;

  24:  

  25:         public void SaveGig(LinkItem item)

  26:         {

  27:             m_linkItem = item;

  28:         }

  29:  

  30:         public LinkItem GetGig()

  31:         {

  32:             return m_linkItem;

  33:         }

  34:     }

  35: }

… the corresponding F# code (Program.fs) reads like so:

   1: #light

   2:  

   3: module GigManager =

   4:     open System

   5:     open System.Runtime.Serialization

   6:     open System.ServiceModel

   7:     

   8:     open ContentTypes

   9:     

  10:     [<ServiceContract(Name = "GigManagerServiceContract", 

  11:         ConfigurationName = "IGigManagerService",

  12:         Namespace = "http://www.thatindigogirl.com/samples/2006/06", 

  13:         SessionMode = SessionMode.Required)>]

  14:     type IGigManagerService =

  15:         [<OperationContract>]

  16:         abstract SaveGig: item : LinkItem -> unit

  17:         [<OperationContract>]

  18:         abstract GetGig: unit -> LinkItem

  19:         

  20:     [<ServiceBehavior(InstanceContextMode = InstanceContextMode.PerSession)>]

  21:     type GigManagerService() =

  22:         let mutable li : LinkItem = LinkItem()

  23:         interface IGigManagerService with

  24:             member gms.SaveGig(item) = li <- item                

  25:             member gms.GetGig() = li

Careful readers will notice that there’s one additional element in the F# version that isn’t in the C# version; specifically, on line 11, I’ve added a “ConfigurationName” element to the IGigManagerService’s ServiceContract attribute. I do this because, again, the F# compiler is doing some interesting things to the code under the hood. In particular, the interface IGigManagerService is actually exposed under a slightly different name—remember, F# likes to use nested classes, not namespaces, so where the C# version of IGigManagerService is formally known as “GigManager::IGigManagerService”, the F# version is “Program/GigManager/GigManagerService”, where Program is the name of the .fs file. This seems to cause WCF some heartache when it starts looking through the App.config file and matching it up against the names exported from the actual class—it won’t match up correctly. So, by giving it a ConfigurationName that matches the human-readable interface name, WCF is happy again.

Lesson #5: Use ConfigurationName on ServiceContract to avoid having to learn F#’s naming bindings to the CLR.

The rest of the code in Program.fs is the hosting code, which structurally is no different than that of the previous post.

One key thing to remember, however, is that the host “service” element will also be looking at type names, so if you forget to set the name of the service, you’ll need to use a type-investigation tool (ILDasm or Reflector) to figure out what the host class name is; in the case above, it would be “Program+GigManager+GigManagerService”, forcing the App.config file to read as follows:

   1: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>

   2: <configuration>

   3:   <system.serviceModel>

   4:     <services>

   5:       <service name="Program+GigManager+GigManagerService" 

   6:                behaviorConfiguration="serviceBehavior">

   7:         <host>

   8:           <baseAddresses>

   9:             <add baseAddress="http://localhost:8000"/>

  10:             <add baseAddress="net.tcp://localhost:9000"/>

  11:           </baseAddresses>

  12:         </host>

  13:         <endpoint address="GigManagerService"

  14:                   binding="netTcpBinding"

  15:                   contract="IGigManagerService" />

  16:         <endpoint address="mex"

  17:                   binding="mexHttpBinding"

  18:                   contract="IMetadataExchange" />

  19:       </service>

  20:     </services>

  21:       <behaviors>

  22:           <serviceBehaviors>

  23:               <behavior name="serviceBehavior">

  24:                   <serviceMetadata httpGetEnabled="true"/>

  25:               </behavior>

  26:           </serviceBehaviors>

  27:       </behaviors>

  28:     <!-- This <diagnostics> section should be placed inside the <system.serviceModel> section. In addition, you'll need to add the <system.diagnostics> snippet to specify service model trace listeners and a file for output. -->

  29:     <diagnostics performanceCounters="All" wmiProviderEnabled="true" >

  30:       <messageLogging logEntireMessage="true" logMalformedMessages="true" logMessagesAtServiceLevel="true" logMessagesAtTransportLevel="true" maxMessagesToLog="100000"  />

  31:     </diagnostics>

  32:   </system.serviceModel>

  33:   <!-- This <system.diagnostics> section illustrates the use of a shared listener for service model output. It requires you to also add the <diagnostics> snippet for the <system.serviceModel> section. -->

  34:   <system.diagnostics >

  35:     <sharedListeners>

  36:       <add name="sharedListener" 

  37:                  type="System.Diagnostics.XmlWriterTraceListener"

  38:                  initializeData="c:\logs\servicetrace.svclog" />

  39:     </sharedListeners>

  40:     <sources>

  41:       <source name="System.ServiceModel" switchValue="Verbose, ActivityTracing" >

  42:         <listeners>

  43:           <add name="sharedListener" />

  44:         </listeners>

  45:       </source>

  46:       <source name="System.ServiceModel.MessageLogging" switchValue="Verbose">

  47:         <listeners>

  48:           <add name="sharedListener" />

  49:         </listeners>

  50:       </source>

  51:     </sources>

  52:   </system.diagnostics>

  53: </configuration>

Caveat emptor. In all honesty, despite the motivation of Lesson #5, I don’t think there’s any way around learning at least a little bit of F#’s name-mapping scheme, but at least we can be selective about where and when we apply it.

From Scott Hanselman's blog:

Are you in King County/Seattle/Redmond/Bellevue Washington and surrounding areas? Are you a huge nerd? Perhaps a geek? No? Maybe a dork, dweeb or wonk. Maybe you're in town for an SDR (Software Design Review) visiting BillG. Quite possibly you're just a normal person.

Regardless, why not join us for some Mall Food at the Crossroads Bellevue Mall Food Court on Monday, January 19th around 6:30pm?

...

NOTE: RSVP by leaving a comment here and show up on January 19th at 6:30pm! Feel free to bring friends, kids or family. Bring a Ruby or Java person!

Any of the SeaJUG want to attend? (Anybody know of a Ruby JUG in the Eastside area, by the way?) I'm game....

For a while now, I’ve held the opinion that the “sweet spot” for functional languages on the JVM and CLR will be in the services space, since services and functions seem pretty similar to one another in spirit—a given input produces a given output, with (ideally) no shared state, high concurrency expectations, idempotent processing, and so on. This isn’t to say that a functional language is going to make a non-trivial service trivial, but I think it will make it simpler and more likely to scale better over time, particularly as the service gets more complicated.

As part those explorations into the union of services and functional languages, I’ve been taking some of Michele Leroux Bustamente’s excellent labs from Learning WCF and flipping the services over to F#. Along the way, I’ve discovered a few “quirks” of F# that make building a WCF service a tad more complicated than it needs to be, so I’ve decided to blog what’s going on so others can find it easier.

(Many thanks to Nick Holmes’ blog, which helped identify one of the first problems I ran into, though a few things have changed since he blogged back in February, so I thought I’d catch everything up to the Sep 08 CTP of F#.)

This isn’t intended to be a tutorial on WCF, so if you’re not familiar with WCF, I strongly suggest you go get Michele’s book. I’m assuming you’ll know the WCF basics (address, binding, contract, config files, behaviors, etc), and I just want to show the deltas necessary to make F# work. Note that I’m just doing the service side of things—I believe clients will probably continue to be written in C# or VB or some other OO language, in keeping with the theory that OO will remain the predominant way of developing client-facing stuff. (Note that this also neatly avoids the basic problem that svcutil.exe only generates either C# or VB proxy code, and that “Add Service Reference” isn’t available inside an F# project, as of this writing.)

Defining Contracts in F#

The first step in any straight-up WCF service is, of course, to define the contract that both sides will agree to. (Yes, I know, we could do everything in terms of picking Message types apart; I’ll get to that in a later piece.) First things first: taking Michele’s HelloIndigo_Part1 solution, I add a new project to it, “FHost”, an F# application. Add the System.ServiceModel and System.Runtime.Serialization assemblies, and we’re good to get going.

Michele’s “HelloIndigo_Part1” solution defines the contract between client and service this way:

   1: namespace Host

   2: {

   3:     [ServiceContract(Namespace = "http://www.thatindigogirl.com/samples/2006/06")]

   4:     public interface IHelloIndigoService

   5:     {

   6:         [OperationContract]

   7:         string HelloIndigo();

   8:     }

   9:     // ...

  10: }

This contract can be consumed in two ways; one is to build this interface into its own assembly that’s linked to both the WCF service host and to the WCF client, but in her example (as is perfectly reasonable in a WCF project), she repeats the interface in both the client and the service, so to be faithful to that, let’s define the interface in the F# code:

   1: #light

   2:  

   3: open System

   4: open System.ServiceModel

   5:  

   6: [< ServiceContract(Namespace = "http://www.thatindigogirl.com/samples/2006/06") >]

   7: type IHelloIndigoService =

   8:     [< OperationContract >]

   9:     abstract HelloIndigo: unit -> string

(The color syntax highlighting is off because I’m using the C# mode of the “Code Snippet” plugin in Windows Live Writer to post the code, and it doesn’t have an F# mode. Yet.)

Pay very close attention to the interface definition in F#, because there is a subtle WCF “bug” that F# exposes by accident. When F# compiles an interface, if a method in the interface has parameters, if no name is specified for that parameter, then WCF will throw an ArgumentNullException when you try to run svcutil.exe over the compiled assembly, or when you pass the type in to the ServiceHost constructor, claiming “Value cannot be null. Parameter name: name”. The problem is that F#, unlike C# or VB, allows methods to have parameters without names, and WCF can’t handle this. Verifying this is a b*tch; if you use ILDasm to view the F#-compiled assembly, it looks like there are parameter names there, because ILDasm generates them as placeholders for display. (Reflector is your friend here.)

The WCF team has basically said that this behavior is by design—SOAP, which is a key concept to the WCF stack, doesn’t really have great support for unnamed parameters (and yes, I know, this is not exactly true, but I’m not going to get into that debate here), so the WCF team has basically said there’s really nothing they can do but maybe issue a better error message than ArgumentNullException.

Lesson #1: Always name your WCF contract interface params.

Caveat emptor.

Defining the Service Implementation

Next step is to define the service implementation. Again, Michele’s code looks like so:

   1: public class HelloIndigoService : IHelloIndigoService

   2: {

   3:     public string HelloIndigo()

   4:     {

   5:         return "Hello Indigo";

   6:     }

   7: }

Not a really difficult operation, so converting that to F# is pretty straightforward:

   1: [< ServiceBehavior(ConfigurationName="HIS") >]    

   2: type HelloIndigoService() =

   3:     interface IHelloIndigoService with

   4:         member s.HelloIndigo() : string =

   5:             "Hello Indigo"

There are two things important to this definition. First, the parentheses at the end of the “type” declaration line create a default no-argument constructor for the HelloIndigoService, which is required—without it, WCF is going to complain about being unable to construct an instance of this type.

Lesson #2: Always provide the default type constructor in the service implementation.

Second, the ServiceBehavior attribute is one I’ve added, because F# does some funky things with the type names during compilation; for example, since my F# code is in a file called “Host.fs”, the F# compiler synthesizes a class called “Host” which acts as a nesting wrapper around everything else in the file, so technically the typename of HelloIndigoService is now “Host+HelloIndigoService”, which will cause some chaos when WCF tries to match up the service name with the appropriate entry in the App.config file. You can either make sure the App.config matches the CLR-level type names generated by the F# compiler, or you can explicitly specify the configuration names; I choose the latter, so that it’s a bit more clear what’s going on.

Lesson #3: Always specify the configuration name on the service implementation.

The App.config file, by the way, now looks like this, the only change from Michele’s labs being the changes to the configuration name of the service behavior (line 13):

   1: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>

   2: <configuration>

   3:     <system.serviceModel>

   4:         <behaviors>

   5:             <serviceBehaviors>

   6:                 <behavior name="serviceBehavior">

   7:                     <serviceMetadata httpGetEnabled="false" />

   8:                 </behavior>

   9:             </serviceBehaviors>

  10:         </behaviors>

  11:         <services>

  12:             <service behaviorConfiguration="serviceBehavior" 

  13:                      name="HIS">

  14:                 <clear />

  15:                 <endpoint address="HelloIndigoService" 

  16:                           binding="basicHttpBinding"

  17:                           name="basicHttp" 

  18:                           contract="Host+IHelloIndigoService" />

  19:                 <endpoint binding="mexHttpBinding" 

  20:                           name="mex" 

  21:                           contract="IMetadataExchange" />

  22:                 <host>

  23:                     <baseAddresses>

  24:                         <add baseAddress="http://localhost:8000/HelloIndigo" />

  25:                     </baseAddresses>

  26:                 </host>

  27:             </service>

  28:         </services>

  29:     </system.serviceModel>

  30: </configuration>

Still with me? One last part to go, defining the (self-hosting) host.

Defining the Self-Hosting Host

In simple examples, frequently the service code self-hosts, meaning it doesn’ t need to be deployed into IIS. Michele uses a wrapper class to defer some of the hosting details, a la:

   1: internal class MyServiceHost

   2: {

   3:     internal static ServiceHost myServiceHost = null;

   4:  

   5:     internal static void StartService()

   6:     {

   7:         // Instantiate new ServiceHost 

   8:         myServiceHost = new ServiceHost(typeof(HelloIndigoService));

   9:         myServiceHost.Open();

  10:     }

  11:  

  12:     internal static void StopService()

  13:     {

  14:         // Call StopService from your shutdown logic (i.e. dispose method)

  15:         if (myServiceHost.State != CommunicationState.Closed)

  16:             myServiceHost.Close();

  17:     }

  18: }

  19:  

  20: class Program

  21: {

  22:     static void Main(string[] args)

  23:     {

  24:         try

  25:         {

  26:             MyServiceHost.StartService();

  27:             Console.WriteLine("Press <ENTER> to terminate the host application");

  28:             Console.ReadLine();

  29:         }

  30:         finally

  31:         {

  32:             MyServiceHost.StopService();

  33:         }

  34:     }

  35: }

I don’t quite think the wrapper is necessary, so I simplified it down to:

   1: let main() =

   2:     Console.WriteLine("IHelloIndigoService = " + typeof<IHelloIndigoService>.ToString() )

   3:  

   4:     let hisType = typeof<HelloIndigoService>

   5:     let host = new ServiceHost(hisType, ([| |] : Uri[] ) )

   6:     host.Open()

   7:     Console.WriteLine("Press <ENTER> to terminate the host application")

   8:     Console.ReadLine() |> ignore

   9:     host.Close()

  10:  

  11: main()

One quirk of the current (Sept 08) F# CTP is that when working with variable-argument parameters (like the second argument of the ServiceHost constructor), F# doesn’t have a great syntax. We have to explicitly specify, in this case, an empty array of Uri objects, but simply specifying an empty array (“[| |]”) will be interpreted as an empty array of objects, and thus generate a compile error. We have to explicitly set the type of the array to be an array of Uri, hence the type specifier.

Oh, and don’t forget, if you’re running as a non-Administrator on Vista or XP, you’ll need to create a URL ACL to allow a non-Administrator user to create an HTTP endpoint; the relevant command for the example above is this:

netsh http add urlacl url=http://+:8000/HelloIndigo user=devtop-t42p\ted

(Obviously, you substitute in your own domain and username for mine.) Make sure to do this from an Administrator-enabled command prompt, or you’ll just get another security error.

The beautiful thing about this example is that if it works, you can use the Client written in C# without a hitch of a problem, thus demonstrating quite clearly that WCF isn’t sharing assemblies between client and service. Given that this service also sets up the MEX endpoint, you should also be able to run svcutil against the running service and generate proxy code if you want to prove that it’s doable; I didn’t do it for this example, since I trust that the App.config-specified MEX endpoint will still be there, and because I was more interested in taking the existing Client and making it work as-is.

More to come, but this should get you started, anyway. Thanks again to Michele for letting me scaffold off of her!

Chris Sells, an acquaintance (and perhaps friend, when he's not picking on me for my Java leanings) of mine from my DevelopMentor days, has a habit of putting on a "DevCon" whenever a technology seems to have reached a certain maturity level. He did it with XML a few years ago, and ATL before that, both of which were pretty amazing events, filled with the sharpest guys in the subject, gathered into a single room to share ideas and shoot each others' pet theories full of holes.

He's at it again, this time with DSLs; from the announcement on his blog:

Are you interested in presenting a 45-minute talk on some Domain Specific Language (DSL) related topic? It doesn't matter which platform or OS you're targeting. It also doesn't matter whether you're an author, a vendor, a professional speaker or a developer in the trenches (in fact, I tend to be biased toward the latter). We're after interesting and unique applications of DSL technology and if you're doing good work in that area, then I need you to send me a session topic and 2-4 sentence abstract along with a little bit about yourself.

I'll be taking submissions 'til February 9th, 2009, but don't delay. Passion and a burning story to tell count twice as much as anything else.

And don't be shy about spreading this announcement around! I've got good coverage in the .NET and Windows communities, but don't know very many folks in the Java or Unix or hardcore modeling worlds, so if you're in that world, let those guys know! Thanks.

The DSL DevCon itself will be in Redmond, WA on the Microsoft campus April 16-17, 2009, right after the Lang.NET conference. Lang.NET will be focused on general-purpose languages, whereas the DSL DevCon will focus on domain-specific languages. The idea is that if you want to attend one or the other or both, that's totally fine. We'll have 2.5 days of Lang.NET on April 14-16 and then 1.5 days of DSL DevCon content.

Oh, and the cost for both conferences is the same: $0.

We're only accepting 150 attendees to either conference. Every one of the five previous DevCons have sold out, so when we open registration, you'll want to be quick about getting your name on the list.

Submit your DSL-related talk idea!

For those of you who are deep in the Java or Ruby space, I really urge you to take a chance here and come to the event--just because it's being held on the Microsoft campus doesn't mean you're going to be forcibly plugged into the Matrix; the same goes for the Lang.NET event in the earlier part of the week, too. Don't believe me? I have proof: Brian Goetz, John Rose, and Charlie Nutter, Sun employees all, attended last years Lang.NET event, talked about the JVM and JRuby, and not only did they not have to give up their "sun.com" email addresses, but they came away with some new appreciations for the CLR, the ecosystem there, and even a few insights about their own platform in comparison to the JVM. (I won't say this as an absolute fact, but I think a lot of John's work on method handles for Java7 came out of conversations he'd had with some of the CLR guys that week.)

This is a DevCon, not a MarCon or a SaleCon. If you're a dev, you're welcome to come here. Frankly, I'd love to see the Java and Ruby (and LLVM and Parrot and ...) guys storm the castle, so to speak, if for no other reason than so Chris will stop teasing me about being a Java guy.

This is more a continuation of my earlier Windows7 post, but I've installed the new Windows7 beta into a VMWare Fusion VM with zero difficulties, and I just finished putting VS2008 (and the SP1 patch) on it, then the latest F# CTP on top of that, and so far it all looks pretty smooth. Put in the DDK and the SDK, and I've got a nice Windows7 development image to play with.

I've had a few people ask me if I've still had problems with the mouse, but to be honest I installed it without the driver installed in the VMWare Tools install, so as soon as I copy off the .vmdk and .vmss files to a quiet little corner of the hard drive as backup, I'll try installing the mouse driver to see if it works, and report back here soon.

An open message to the Visual Studio installation team: One thing I'd like to see changed for VS2010--instead of giving me a "cmd.exe" environment for using VS from the command-line, can you at least give me a PowerShell .ps1 shell link to go alongside it? And why does the VS2008 SP1 patch require me to put Visual Studio in the CD tray to reference the vs_setup.msi about halfway through?

Update: Mouse driver works flawlessly. Dunno if it was a bug they fixed, or just random good VM karma, but the entire VMWare Tools package now works perfectly, as far as I can tell. Note: I haven't heard any sound out of it, but sometimes the sound driver in Fusion cuts out for reasons beyond my understanding, and after a reboot, sound is back without a problem. Besides, sound is not as important to me in a work VM as mouse or network, anyway, so....

For a couple of years now, I've been going around the world and giving a talk entitled "Pragmatic Architecture", talking both about what architecture is (and what architects really do), and ending the talk with my own "catalog" of architectural elements and ideas, in an attempt to take some of the mystery and "cloud" nature of architecture out of the discussion. If you've read Effective Enterprise Java, then you've read the first version of that discussion, where Pragmatic Architecture was a second-generation thought process.

Recently, the patterns & practices group at Microsoft went back and refined their Application Architecture Guide, and while there's a lot about it that I wish they'd done differently (less of a Microsoft-centric focus, for one), I think it's a great book for Microsoft-centric architects to pick up and have nearby. In a lot of ways, this is something similar to what I had in mind when I thought about the architectural catalog, though I'll admit that I'd prefer to go one level "deeper" and find more of the "atoms" that make up an architecture.

Nevertheless, I think this is a good PDF to pull down and put somewhere on your reference list.

Notes and caveats: Firstly, this is a book for solution architects; if you're the VP or CTO, don't bother with it, just hand it to somebody further on down the food chain. Secondly, if you're not an architect, this is not the book to pick up to learn how to be one. It's more in the way of a reference guide for existing architects. In fact, my vision is that an architect faced with a new project (that is, a new architecture to create) will think about the problem, sketch out a rough solution in his head, then look at the book to find both potential alternatives (to see if they fit better or worse than the one s/he has in her/his head), and potential consequences (to the one s/he has in her/his head). Thirdly, even if you're a Java or Ruby architect, most of the book is pretty technology-neutral. Just take a black Sharpie to the parts that have the Microsoft trademark around them, and you'll find it a pretty decent reference, too. Fourthly, in the spirit of full disclosure, the p&p guys brought me in for a day of discussion on the Guide, so I can't say that I'm completely unbiased, but I can honestly say that I didn't write any of it, just offered critique (in case that matters to any potential readers).

It's once again that time of year, and in keeping with my tradition, I'll revisit the 2008 predictions to see how close I came before I start waxing prophetic on the coming year. (I'm thinking that maybe the next year--2010's edition--I should actually take a shot at predicting the next decade, but I'm not sure if I'd remember to go back and revisit it in 2020 to see how I did. Anybody want to set a calendar reminder for Dec 31 2019 and remind me, complete with URL? )

Without further preamble, here's what I said for 2008:

• THEN: General: The buzz around building custom languages will only continue to build. More and more tools are emerging to support the creation of custom programming languages, like Microsoft's Phoenix, Scala's parser combinators, the Microsoft DLR, SOOT, Javassist, JParsec/NParsec, and so on. Suddenly, the whole "write your own lexer and parser and AST from scratch" idea seems about as outmoded as the idea of building your own String class. Granted, there are cases where a from-hand scanner/lexer/parser/AST/etc is the Right Thing To Do, but there are times when building your own String class is the Right Thing To Do, too. Between the rich ecosystem of dynamic languages that could be ported to the JVM/CLR, and the interesting strides being made on both platforms (JVM and CLR) to make them more "dynamic-friendly" (such as being able to reify classes or access the call stack directly), the probability that your company will find a need that is best answered by building a custom language are only going to rise. NOW: The buzz has definitely continued to build, but buzz can only take us so far. There's been some scattershot use of custom languages in a few scattershot situations, but it's certainly not "taken the world by storm" in any meaningful way yet.
• THEN: General: The hype surrounding "domain-specific languages" will peak in 2008, and start to generate a backlash. Let's be honest: when somebody looks you straight in the eye and suggests that "scattered, smothered and covered" is a domain-specific language, the term has lost all meaning. A lexicon unique to an industry is not a domain-specific language; it's a lexicon. Period. If you can incorporate said lexicon into your software, thus making it accessible to non-technical professionals, that's a good thing. But simply using the lexicon doesn't make it a domain-specific language. Or, alternatively, if you like, every single API designed for a particular purpose is itself a domain-specific language. This means that Spring configuration files are a DSL. Deployment descriptors are a DSL. The Java language is a DSL (since the domain is that of programmers familiar with the Java language). See how nonsensical this can get? Until somebody comes up with a workable definition of the term "domain" in "domain-specific language", it's a nonsensical term. The idea is a powerful one, mind you--creating something that's more "in tune" with what users understand and can use easily is a technique that's been proven for decades now. Anybody who's ever watched an accountant rip an entirely new set of predictions for the new fiscal outlook based entirely on a few seed numbers and a deeply-nested set of Excel macros knows this already. Whether you call them domain-specific languages or "little languages" or "user-centric languages" or "macro language" is really up to you. NOW: The backlash hasn't begun, but only because the DSL buzz hasn't materialized in much way yet--see previous note. It generally takes a year or two of deployments (and hard-earned experience) before a backlash begins, and we haven't hit that "deployments" stage yet in anything yet resembling "critical mass" yet. But the DSL/custom language buzz continues to grow, and the more the buzz grows, the more the backlash is likey.
• THEN: General: Functional languages will begin to make their presence felt. Between Microsoft's productization plans for F# and the growing community of Scala programmers, not to mention the inherently functional concepts buried inside of LINQ and the concurrency-friendly capabilities of side-effect-free programming, the world is going to find itself working its way into functional thinking either directly or indirectly. And when programmers start to see the inherent capabilities inside of Scala (such as Actors) and/or F# (such as asynchronous workflows), they're going to embrace the strange new world of functional/object hybrid and never look back. NOW: Several books on F# and Scala (and even one or two on Haskell!) were published in 2008, and several more (including one of my own) are on the way. The functional buzz is building, and lots of disparate groups are each evaluating it (functional programming) independently.
• THEN: General: MacOS is going to start posting some serious market share numbers, leading lots of analysts to predict that Microsoft Windows has peaked and is due to collapse sometime within the remainder of the decade. Mac's not only a wonderful OS, but it's some of the best hardware to run Vista on. That will lead not a few customers to buy Mac hardware, wipe the machine, and install Vista, as many of the uber-geeks in the Windows world are already doing. This will in turn lead Gartner (always on the lookout for an established trend they can "predict" on) to suggest that Mac is going to end up with 115% market share by 2012 (.8 probability), then sell you this wisdom for a mere price of $1.5 million (per copy). NOW: Can't speak to the Gartner report--I didn't have $1.5 million handy--but certainly the MacOS is growing in popularity. More on that later.
• THEN: General: Ted will be hired by Gartner... if only to keep him from smacking them around so much. .0001 probability, with probability going up exponentially as my salary offer goes up exponentially. (Hey, I've got kids headed for college in a few years.) NOW: Well, Gartner appears to have lost my email address and phone number, but I'm sure they were planning to make me that offer.
• THEN: General: MacOS is going to start creaking in a few places. The Mac OS is a wonderful OS, but it's got its own creaky parts, and the more users that come to Mac OS, the more that software packages are going to exploit some of those creaky parts, leading to some instability in the Mac OS. It won't be widespread, but for those who are interested in finding it, they're there. Assuming current trends (of customers adopting Mac OS) hold, the Mac OS 10.6 upgrade is going to be a very interesting process, indeed. NOW: Shhh. Don't tell anybody, but I've been seeing it starting to happen. Don't get me wrong, Apple still does a pretty good job with the OS, but the law of numbers has started to create some bad upgrade scenarios for some people.
• THEN: General: Somebody is going to realize that iTunes is the world's biggest monopoly on music, and Apple will be forced to defend itself in the court of law, the court of public opinion, or both. Let's be frank: if this were Microsoft, offering music that can only be played on Microsoft music players, the world would be through the roof. All UI goodness to one side, the iPod represents just as much of a monopoly in the music player business as Internet Explorer did in the operating system business, and if the world doesn't start taking Apple to task over this, then "justice" is a word that only applies when losers in an industry want to drag down the market leader (which I firmly believe to be the case--nobody likes more than to pile on the successful guy). NOW: Nothing this year.
• THEN: General: Somebody is going to realize that the iPhone's "nothing we didn't write will survive the next upgrade process" policy is nothing short of draconian. As my father, who gets it right every once in a while, says, "If I put a third-party stereo in my car, the dealer doesn't get to rip it out and replace it with one of their own (or nothing at all!) the next time I take it in for an oil change". Fact is, if I buy the phone, I own the phone, and I own what's on it. Unfortunately, this takes us squarely into the realm of DRM and IP ownership, and we all know how clear-cut that is... But once the general public starts to understand some of these issues--and I think the iPhone and iTunes may just be the vehicle that will teach them--look out, folks, because the backlash will be huge. As in, "Move over, Mr. Gates, you're about to be joined in infamy by your other buddy Steve...." NOW: Apple released iPhone 2.0, and with it, the iPhone SDK, so at least Apple has opened the dashboard to third-party stereos. But the deployment model (AppStore) is still a bit draconian, and Apple still jealously holds the reins over which apps can be deployed there and which ones can't, so maybe they haven't learned their lesson yet, after all....
• THEN: Java: The OpenJDK in Mercurial will slowly start to see some external contributions. The whole point of Mercurial is to allow for deeper control over which changes you incorporate into your build tree, so once people figure out how to build the JDK and how to hack on it, the local modifications will start to seep across the Internet.... NOW: OpenJDK has started to collect contributions from external (to Sun) sources, but still in relatively small doses, it seems. None of the local modifications I envisioned creeping across the 'Net have begun, that I can see, so maybe it's still waiting to happen. Or maybe the OpenJDK is too complicated to really allow for that kind of customization, and it never will.
• THEN: Java: SpringSource will soon be seen as a vendor like BEA or IBM or Sun. Perhaps with a bit better reputation to begin, but a vendor all the same. NOW: SpringSource's acquisition of G2One (the company behind Groovy just as SpringSource backs Spring) only reinforced this image, but it seems it's still something that some fail to realize or acknowledge due to Spring's open-source (?) nature. (I'm not a Spring expert by any means, but apparently Spring 3 was pulled back inside the SpringSource borders, leading some people to wonder what SpringSource is up to, and whether or not Spring will continue to be open source after all.)
• THEN: .NET: Interest in OpenJDK will bootstrap similar interest in Rotor/SSCLI. After all, they're both VMs, with lots of interesting ideas and information about how the managed platforms work. NOW: Nope, hasn't really happened yet, that I can see. Not even the 2nd edition of the SSCLI book (by Joel Pobar and yours truly, yes that was a plug) seemed to foster the kind of attention or interest that I'd expected, or at least, not on the scale I'd thought might happen.
• THEN: C++/Native: If you've not heard of LLVM before this, you will. It's a compiler and bytecode toolchain aimed at the native platforms, complete with JIT and GC. NOW: Apple sank a lot of investment into LLVM, including hosting an LLVM conference at the corporate headquarters.
• THEN: Java: Somebody will create Yet Another Rails-Killer Web Framework. 'Nuff said. NOW: You know what? I honestly can't say whether this happened or not; I was completely not paying attention.
• THEN: Native: Developers looking for a native programming language will discover D, and be happy. Considering D is from the same mind that was the core behind the Zortech C++ compiler suite, and that D has great native platform integration (building DLLs, calling into DLLs easily, and so on), not to mention automatic memory management (except for those areas where you want manual memory management), it's definitely worth looking into. www.digitalmars.com NOW: D had its own get-together as well, and appears to still be going strong, among the group of developers who still work on native apps (and aren't simply maintaining legacy C/C++ apps).

Now, for the 2009 predictions. The last set was a little verbose, so let me see if I can trim the list down a little and keep it short and sweet:

• General: "Cloud" will become the next "ESB" or "SOA", in that it will be something that everybody will talk about, but few will understand and even fewer will do anything with. (Considering the widespread disparity in the definition of the term, this seems like a no-brainer.)
• Java: Interest in Scala will continue to rise, as will the number of detractors who point out that Scala is too hard to learn.
• .NET: Interest in F# will continue to rise, as will the number of detractors who point out that F# is too hard to learn. (Hey, the two really are cousins, and the fortunes of one will serve as a pretty good indication of the fortunes of the other, and both really seem to be on the same arc right now.)
• General: Interest in all kinds of functional languages will continue to rise, and more than one person will take a hint from Bob "crazybob" Lee and liken functional programming to AOP, for good and for ill. People who took classes on Haskell in college will find themselves reaching for their old college textbooks again.
• General: The iPhone is going to be hailed as "the enterprise development platform of the future", and companies will be rolling out apps to it. Look for Quicken iPhone edition, PowerPoint and/or Keynote iPhone edition, along with connectors to hook the iPhone up to a presentation device, and (I'll bet) a World of Warcraft iPhone client (legit or otherwise). iPhone is the new hotness in the mobile space, and people will flock to it madly.
• .NET: Another Oslo CTP will come out, and it will bear only a superficial resemblance to the one that came out in October at PDC. Betting on Oslo right now is a fools' bet, not because of any inherent weakness in the technology, but just because it's way too early in the cycle to be thinking about for anything vaguely resembling production code.
• .NET: The IronPython and IronRuby teams will find some serious versioning issues as they try to manage the DLR versioning story between themselves and the CLR as a whole. An initial hack will result, which will be codified into a standard practice when .NET 4.0 ships. Then the next release of IPy or IRb will have to try and slip around its restrictions in 2010/2011. By 2012, IPy and IRb will have to be shipping as part of Visual Studio just to put the releases back into lockstep with one another (and the rest of the .NET universe).
• Java: The death of JSR-277 will spark an uprising among the two leading groups hoping to foist it off on the Java community--OSGi and Maven--while the rest of the Java world will breathe a huge sigh of relief and look to see what "modularity" means in Java 7. Some of the alpha geeks in Java will start using--if not building--JDK 7 builds just to get a heads-up on its impact, and be quietly surprised and, I dare say, perhaps even pleased.
• Java: The invokedynamic JSR will leapfrog in importance to the top of the list.
• Windows: Another Windows 7 CTP will come out, and it will spawn huge media interest that will eventually be remembered as Microsoft promises, that will eventually be remembered as Microsoft guarantees, that will eventually be remembered as Microsoft FUD and "promising much, delivering little". Microsoft ain't always at fault for the inflated expectations people have--sometimes, yes, perhaps even a lot of times, but not always.
• Mac OS: Apple will begin to legally threaten the clone market again, except this time somebody's going to get the DOJ involved. (Yes, this is the iPhone/iTunes prediction from last year, carrying over. I still expect this to happen.)
• Languages: Alpha-geek developers will start creating their own languages (even if they're obscure or bizarre ones like Shakespeare or Ook#) just to have that listed on their resume as the DSL/custom language buzz continues to build.
• XML Services: Roy Fielding will officially disown most of the "REST"ful authors and software packages available. Nobody will care--or worse, somebody looking to make a name for themselves will proclaim that Roy "doesn't really understand REST". And they'll be right--Roy doesn't understand what they consider to be REST, and the fact that he created the term will be of no importance anymore. Being "REST"ful will equate to "I did it myself!", complete with expectations of a gold star and a lollipop.
• Parrot: The Parrot guys will make at least one more minor point release. Nobody will notice or care, except for a few doggedly stubborn Perl hackers. They will find themselves having nightmares of previous lives carrying around OS/2 books and Amiga paraphernalia. Perl 6 will celebrate it's seventh... or is it eighth?... anniversary of being announced, and nobody will notice.
• Agile: The debate around "Scrum Certification" will rise to a fever pitch as short-sighted money-tight companies start looking for reasons to cut costs and either buy into agile at a superficial level and watch it fail, or start looking to cut the agilists from their company in order to replace them with cheaper labor.
• Flash: Adobe will continue to make Flex and AIR look more like C# and the CLR even as Microsoft tries to make Silverlight look more like Flash and AIR. Web designers will now get to experience the same fun that back-end web developers have enjoyed for near-on a decade, as shops begin to artificially partition themselves up as either "Flash" shops or "Silverlight" shops.
• Personal: Gartner will still come knocking, looking to hire me for outrageous sums of money to do nothing but blog and wax prophetic.

Well, so much for brief or short. See you all again next year....

It amazes me how insular and inward-facing the software industry is. And how the "agile" movement is reaping the benefits of a very simple characteristic.

For example, consider Jeff Palermo's essay on "The Myth of Self-Organizing Teams". Now, nothing against Jeff, or his post, per se, but it amazes me how our industry believes that they are somehow inventing new concepts, such as, in this case the "self-organizing team". Team dynamics have been a subject of study for decades, and anyone with a background in psychology, business, or sales has probably already been through much of the material on it. The best teams are those that find their own sense of identity, that grow from within, but still accept some leadership from the outside--the classic example here being the championship sports team. Most often, that sense of identity is born of a string of successes, which is why teams without a winning tradition have such a hard time creating the esprit de corps that so often defines the difference between success and failure.

(Editor's note: Here's a free lesson to all of you out there who want to help your team grow its own sense of identity: give them a chance to win a few successes, and they'll start coming together pretty quickly. It's not always that easy, but it works more often than not.)

How many software development managers--much less technical leads or project managers--have actually gone and looked through the management aisle at the local bookstore?

Tom and Mary Poppendieck have been spending years now talking about "lean" software development, which itself (at a casual glance) seems to be a refinement of the concepts Toyota and other Japanese manufacturers were pursuing close to two decades ago. "Total quality management" was a concept introduced in those days, the idea that anyone on the production line was empowered to stop the line if they found something that wasn't right. (My father was one of those "lean" manufacturing advocates back in the 80's, in fact, and has some great stories he can tell to its successes, and failures.)

How many software development managers or project leads give their developers the chance to say, "No, it's not right yet, we can't ship", and back them on it? Wouldn't you, as a developer, feel far more involved in the project if you knew you had that power--and that responsibility?

Or consider the "agile" notion of customer involvement, the classic XP "On-Site Customer" principle. Sales people have known for years, even decades (if not centuries), that if you involve the customer in the process, they are much more likely to feel an ownership stake sooner than if they just take what's on the lot or the shelf. Skilled salespeople have done the "let's walk through what you might buy, if you were buying, of course" trick countless numbers of times, and ended up with a sale where the customer didn't even intend to buy.

How many software development managers or project leads have read a book on basic salesmanship? And yet, isn't that notion of extracting what the customer wants endemic to both software development and basic sales (of anything)?

What is it about the software industry that just collectively refuses to accept that there might be lots of interesting research on topics that aren't technical yet still something that we can use? Why do we feel so compelled to trumpet our own "innovations" to ourselves, when in fact, they've been long-known in dozens of other contexts? When will we wake up and realize that we can learn a lot more if we cross-train in other areas... like, for example, getting your MBA?

Dustin Campbell, a self-professed "IDE guy", is speaking at the .NET Developer's Association of Redmond this evening, on the future of Visual Basic in Visual Studio 2010, and I feel compelled, based on my earlier "dissing" of VB in my thoughts of PDC post, to give VB a little love here.

First of all, he notes publicly that the VB and C# teams have been brought together under one roof, organizationally, so that the two languages can evolve in parallel to one another. I have my concerns about this. Frankly, I think the Managed Languages team at Microsoft is making a mistake by making these two languages mirror images of one another, no matter what their customers are telling them; it's creating an artificial competition between them, because if you can't differentiate between the two on a technical level, then the only thing left to differentiate them on is an aesthetic level (do you prefer curly braces and semicolons, or keywords?). Unfortunately, the market has already done so, to the tune of "C# developers make more than VB developers do (on average)", leaving little doubt in the minds of VB developers where they'd rather be... and even less doubt in the minds of C# developers where they'd rather the VB developers remain, lest the supply and demand curves shift and move the equilibrium point of C# developer salaries further south.

Besides, think about this for a moment: how much time and energy has Microsoft (and other .NET authors) had to invest in making sure that every SDK and every article ever written has both C# and VB sample code? All because Microsoft refuses to simply draw a line in the sand and say, once and for all, "C# is the best statically-typed object-oriented language for the CLR on the planet, and Visual Basic is the best dynamically-typed object-oriented language for the CLR on the planet", and run with it. Then at least there would be solid technical reasons for using one or the other, and at least we could take this out of the realm of aesthetics.

Or, contrarily, do the logical thing and create one language with two parsers, switching between them based on the file extension. That guarantees that the two evolve in parallel, and releases resources from the languages team to work on other things.

Next, he shows some simple spin-off-a-thread code, with the Thread constructor taking a parameter to a function name, traditional delegate kinds of stuff, then notes the disjoint nature of referencing a method defined elsewhere in the class but only to be used once. Yes, he's setting up for the punchline: VB gets anonymous methods, and "VB's support for lambda (expressions) reaches parity with C#'s" in this next release. I don't know if this was a feature that VB really needed to get, since I don't know that the target audience for VB is really one that cares about such things (and, before the VB community tries to lynch me, let me be honest and say that I'm not sure the target audience for C# does, either), but at least it's nice that such a powerful feature is now present in the VB language. Subject to the concerns of last paragraph, of course.

Look, at the end of the day, I want C# and VB to be full-featured languages each with their own raison d'etre, as the French say, their own "reason to be". Having these two "evolve in parallel" or "evolve in concert" with one another is only bound to keep the C#-vs-VB language wars going for far too long.

Along the way, he's showing off some IDE features, which presumably will be in place for both C# and VB (since the teams are now unified under a single banner), what he's calling "highlights": they'll do the moral equivalent of brace matching/highlighting, for both method names (usage as well as declaration/definition) and blocks of code. There's also "pretty listing", where the IDE will format code appropriately, particularly for the anonymous methods syntax. Nice, but not something I'm personally going to get incredibly excited about--to me, IDE features like this aren't as important as language features, but I realize I'm in something of the minority there, and that's OK.

He demonstrates VB calling PLINQ (Parallel LINQ), pointing out some of the inherent benefits (and drawbacks) to parallelism. This isn't really a VB "feature" per se. <<MORE>>

Now he gets into some more interesting stuff: he begins by saying, "Now let's talk about the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR)." He shows some VB code hosting the IronPython runtime, simple boilerplate to get the IronPython bits up and running inside this CLR process. (See the DLR Hosting Spec for details, it's pretty straightforward stuff: call IronPython.Hosting.Python.CreateRuntime, then call GetEngine("python") and SetSearchPaths() to tell IPy where to find the Python libs and code.) Where he's going with this is to demonstrate using VB's late-binding capabilities to get hold of a Python file ("random.py", using the DLR UseFile() call), and he dynamically calls the "shuffle" function from that Python file against the array of Ints he set up earlier.

(We get into a discussion as to why the IDE can't give Intellisense on the methods he's calling in the Python code. I won't go into the details, but essentially, no, VS isn't going to be able to do that, at least not for this scenario, any time soon. Maybe if the Python code was used directly from within VS, but not in this hosted sense--that would be a bit much for the IDE to analyze and understand.)

Next he points out some of the "ceremony" remaining in Visual Basic, essentially showing how VB's type inferencing is getting better, such as with array literals, including a background compilation warning where the VB compiler finds that it can't find a common type in the array literal declaration and assumes it to be an array of Object (which is a nice "catch" when the wrong type shows up in the array by accident or typo). He shows off multidimensional array literal and jagged array literal syntax (which requires the internal array literals in the jagged array to be wrapped up in parentheses, a la "{({1,2,3}), ({1, 2, 3, 4, 5})}", which I find a touch awkward and counterintuitive, quite frankly), while he's at it.

(We get into a discussion of finer-granularity color syntax highlighting options, such as colorizing different keywords differently, as well as colorizing different identifiers based on their type. Now that's an interesting idea.)

By the way, one thing that I've always found interesting about VB is its "With" keyword, a la "New Student With {.Id=101, .Name="bart", .Score=53, .Gender="male"}".

He then shows how VB 10 has auto-implemented properties: "Property Gender As String" does exactly what .NET programmers have had to do by hand for so long: create a field, generate simple Get and Set blocks and so on. Another nice feature of this: the autogenerated properties can have defaults, as in, "Public Property Age As Integer = 1". That's kinda nice, and something that VB should have had years ago.

And wahoo! THE UNDERSCORE IS (almost) HISTORY! "Implicit line completion" is a feature of VB 10. This has always plagued me like... well... the plague... when writing VB code. It's not gone completely, there's a few cases where ambiguity would reign without it, but it appears to be gone for 95% of the cases. Because this is such a radical change, they've even gone out and created a website to help the underscores that no longer find themselves necessary: www.unemployedunderscores.com .

He goes into a bit about co- and contravariance in generic types, which VB now supports more readily. (His example is about trying to pass a List(Of Student) into a method taking a List(Of Person), which neither he nor I can remember if it's co- or contra-. Sorry.) The solution is to change the method to take an IEnumerable(Of Person), instead. Not a great solution, but not a bad one, either.

Having freshly converted both the Visual Studio 2010 and Oslo SDK VPC images that we received at PDC 2008 last month to VMWare images, I figure it's time to dive into M.

At PDC, the Addison-Wesley folks were giving away copies of "The 'Oslo' Modeling Language" book, which is apparently official canon of the "M" language for Oslo, so I flip to page 1 and start reading:

The "Oslo" Modeling Language (M) is a modern, declarative language for working with data. M lets users write down how they want to structure and query their data using a convenient textual syntax that is convenient to both author and read.

M does not mandate how data is stored or accessed, nor does it mandate a specific implementation technology. Rather, M was designed to allow users to write down what they want from their data without having to specify how those desires are met against a given technology or platform. That stated, M in no way prohibits implementations from providing rich declarative or imperative support for controlling how M constructs are represented and executed in a given environment.

Hmm... I have to admit, all kinds of warning bells and alarm flags are going off in my head, and we're just two sentences into this thing. This sounds like something we've all done before; in fact, though I've not tried it, I have a feeling that if we were to go back through those two paragraphs and replace every instance of "M" with "SQL", we'd find a paragraph that could easily slip into the opening chapter of any introductory SQL or RDBMS book.

The goals of "separation of declaration from intent" have been around for that long, probably longer, and even the fiercest and staunchest defenders of SQL find themselves sometimes wandering through SQL declarations and code that clearly violate Chris Date's politely-worded commands around normal form and separation of declaration from intent and implementation.

I keep reading, though, and a few paragraphs later, find something intriguing.

Another important aspect of data management that M does not address is that of update. M is a functional language that does not have constructs for changing the contents of an extent. (Author's note: an "extent", defined a few paragraphs earlier, is that "an extent provides dynamic storage for values.") How data changes is outside the scope of the language. That said, M anticipates that the contents of an extent can change via external (to M) stimuli. Subsequent versions of M are expected to provide declarative constructs for updating data.

Wow. So the first question becomes, when are those "subsequent versions" expected? Is this simply a state of the PDC Preview bits, or something that's not in scope for v1 of the Oslo SDK?

I flip through the rest of the first chapter, which seems like a decent overview, and what I see there is an interesting type-declaration language; in many ways, it's highly reminiscent of XML Schema Descriptions (XSD) more than SQL declarations, but I suppose that's to be expected, at least for now. I'm sure they're going to cherry-pick a lot of the best data-declarative constructs from XSD, SQL, and any other metadata-based formats/languages, and that the semantics will change as they explore what works well and what doesn't. For now, though, "M" exists essentially as a data-descriptor language, and this is reinforced when I start playing with "m.exe", the "M compiler" (?).

First thing, I simply fire up "m.exe" to see what the options are. And... nothing. Huh? I wait for a bit, then Ctrl-C it, and start hunting through the documentation to see if I'm missing something here. I try a few different tests, like "m /?" or "m -help", and each time, the compiler just seems to wander off into the weeds, requiring a Ctrl-C to kill it.

What the heck? I know that these are PDC pre-alpha CTP "nothing is guaranteed to work" bits, but this seems a bit on the excessive side--I have every faith that Microsoft wouldn't hand these out if you can't even run the compiler! So acting on a hunch, I fire up "m /?" again, and tab away to look at something else. Sure enough, my hunch is rewarded--after a long pause, eventually the help screen comes up. So, apparently, the m.exe tool just takes fricken forever to run, is all.

Currently, the only targets M can compile to is their internal Repository for storing types, and a generic "T-SQL" target for any T-SQL-compliant database (which I presume for now means only SQL Server of various versions, but theoretically, I suppose, Sybase could work too, given those two systems' shared ancestry. And, given a pretty simple sample to work with, m.exe produces a pretty-easily-anticipated result; this:

module Ted
{
  type Person
  {
    Id : Integer32 = AutoNumber();
    Name : Text;
  } where identity Id;
  People : Person*;    
}

turns into this:

set xact_abort on;
go

begin transaction;
go

set ansi_nulls on;
go

create schema [Ted];
go

create table [Ted].[People]
(
  [Id] int not null identity,
  [Name] nvarchar(max) not null,
  constraint [PK_People] primary key clustered ([Id])
);
go

commit transaction;
go

... which, when you look at it, is pretty much what you'd want.

Interestingly enough, there's no reason why people in the Java or Ruby space couldn't use "M" just as easily, so long as the database targeted is one that M understands. (It also wouldn't be a terribly difficult exercise to build an M compiler in Java or Ruby, for that matter. Might be a fun off-time project, in fact.)

One thing that's also pretty clear is that M is very collection-centric, as the first chapter spends probably 50% of its time describing all the various ways that collections in M (written as "{a, b, c}") interact with one another (they can be compared for equality directly, for example, and have some neat projection/filter capabilities that were clearly drawn from the relational algebra and LINQ syntax). Having said that, though, one thing that is obviously missing is the traditional object "reference"-style connection, where A OWNS-A B.

What this seems to imply, then, is that the object/relational-mapping horrors of the past two decades aren't yet over. What's not clear is how M will make it easier (or if it will at all) to access those extents from the languages we traditionally use in the .NET space (C#, VB, C++/CLI, etc), specifically, what the mechanism for conducting a query will be like, and what it's return types will be when it cross the boundary back into C#.

If you're not sure what I mean by that, consider it this way: ADO.NET has a simple mechanism for taking the query--a raw string as a parameter--and executing it, and when it returns, it's handed back to your C# code as a DataSet, or else as an IDataReader for row-based/column-based firehose-style consumption. Much of the criticism of ADO.NET stems around two parts: the untyped nature of the query string, leading to potential typos and errors, and the relative awkwardness for extracting the data from the results, either the DataSet or the IDataReader, at least when compared to languages that have built-in set/tuple constructs.

The one sample that does show any sort of C# -> M kinds of interaction is in the MParserDemo sample, and here, when it queries the database, it does so using traditional ADO.NET API calls, so I'm not sure it's to be taken as a good indicator of the plans around M yet.

If all there was to Oslo was "M", I'd say it was an interesting little side-note at PDC, something that maybe a few folks might find interesting and otherwise not worth studying, but this is not the sum total of the Oslo bits; there is also Mg, the MGrammar language, a language specifically for building DSLs, and that's where my attention (and next blog post) is going next.

Roy Fielding has weighed in on the recent "buzzwordiness" (hey, if Colbert can make up "truthiness", then I can make up "buzzwordiness") of calling everything a "REST API", a tactic that has become more en vogue of late as vendors discover that the general programming population is finding the WSDL-based XML services stack too complex to navigate successfully for all but the simplest of projects. Contrary to what many RESTafarians may be hoping, Roy doesn't gather all these wayward children to his breast and praise their anti-vendor/anti-corporate/anti-proprietary efforts, but instead, blasts them pretty seriously for mangling his term:

I am getting frustrated by the number of people calling any HTTP-based interface a REST API. Today’s example is the SocialSite REST API. That is RPC. It screams RPC. There is so much coupling on display that it should be given an X rating.

Ouch. "So much coupling on display that it should be given an X rating." I have to remember that phrase--that's a keeper. And I'm shocked that Roy even knows what an X rating is; he's such a mellow guy with such an innocent-looking face, I would've bet money he'd never run into one before. (Yes, people, that's a joke.)

What needs to be done to make the REST architectural style clear on the notion that hypertext is a constraint? In other words, if the engine of application state (and hence the API) is not being driven by hypertext, then it cannot be RESTful and cannot be a REST API. Period. Is there some broken manual somewhere that needs to be fixed?

Go Roy!

For those of you who've not read Roy's thesis, and are thinking that this is some kind of betrayal or trick, let's first of all point out that at no point is Roy saying that your nifty HTTP-based API is not useful or simple. He's simply saying that it isn't RESTful. That's a key differentiation. REST has a specific set of goals and constraints it was trying to meet, and as such prescribes a particular kind of architectural style to fit within those constraints. (Yes, REST is essentially an architectural pattern: a solution to a problem within a certain context that yields certain consequences.)

Assuming you haven't tuned me out completely already, allow me to elucidate. In Chapter 5 of Roy's thesis, Roy begins to build up the style that will ultimately be considered REST. I'm not going to quote each and every step here--that's what the hyperlink above is for--but simply call out certain parts. For example, in section 5.1.3, "Stateless", he suggests that this architectural style should be stateless in nature, and explains why; the emphasis/italics are mine:

We next add a constraint to the client-server interaction: communication must be stateless in nature, as in the client-stateless-server (CSS) style of Section 3.4.3 (Figure 5-3), such that each request from client to server must contain all of the information necessary to understand the request, and cannot take advantage of any stored context on the server. Session state is therefore kept entirely on the client.

This constraint induces the properties of visibility, reliability, and scalability. Visibility is improved because a monitoring system does not have to look beyond a single request datum in order to determine the full nature of the request. Reliability is improved because it eases the task of recovering from partial failures [133]. Scalability is improved because not having to store state between requests allows the server component to quickly free resources, and further simplifies implementation because the server doesn't have to manage resource usage across requests.

Like most architectural choices, the stateless constraint reflects a design trade-off. The disadvantage is that it may decrease network performance by increasing the repetitive data (per-interaction overhead) sent in a series of requests, since that data cannot be left on the server in a shared context. In addition, placing the application state on the client-side reduces the server's control over consistent application behavior, since the application becomes dependent on the correct implementation of semantics across multiple client versions.

In the HTTP case, the state is contained entirely in the document itself, the hypertext. This has a couple of implications for those of us building "distributed applications", such as the very real consideration that there's a lot of state we don't necessarily want to be sending back to the client, such as voluminous information (the user's e-commerce shopping cart contents) or sensitive information (the user's credentials or single-signon authentication/authorization token). This is a bitter pill to swallow for the application development world, because much of the applications we develop have some pretty hefty notions of server-based state management that we want or need to preserve, either for legacy support reasons, for legitimate concerns (network bandwidth or security), or just for ease-of-understanding. Fielding isn't apologetic about it, though--look at the third paragraph above. "[T]he stateless constraint reflects a design trade-off."

In other words, if you don't like it, fine, don't follow it, but understand that if you're not leaving all the application state on the client, you're not doing REST.

By the way, note that technically, HTTP is not tied to HTML, since the document sent back and forth could easily be a PDF document, too, particularly since PDF supports hyperlinks to other PDF documents. Nowhere in the thesis do we see the idea that it has to be HTML flying back and forth.

Roy's thesis continues on in the same vein; in section 5.1.4 he describes how "client-cache-stateless-server" provides some additional reliability and performance, but only if the data in the cache is consistent and not stale, which was fine for static documents, but not for dynamic content such as image maps. Extensions were necessary in order to accomodate the new ideas.

In section 5.1.5 ("Uniform Interface") we get to another stinging rebuke of REST as a generalized distributed application scheme; again, the emphasis is mine:

The central feature that distinguishes the REST architectural style from other network-based styles is its emphasis on a uniform interface between components (Figure 5-6). By applying the software engineering principle of generality to the component interface, the overall system architecture is simplified and the visibility of interactions is improved. Implementations are decoupled from the services they provide, which encourages independent evolvability. The trade-off, though, is that a uniform interface degrades efficiency, since information is transferred in a standardized form rather than one which is specific to an application's needs. The REST interface is designed to be efficient for large-grain hypermedia data transfer, optimizing for the common case of the Web, but resulting in an interface that is not optimal for other forms of architectural interaction.

In order to obtain a uniform interface, multiple architectural constraints are needed to guide the behavior of components. REST is defined by four interface constraints: identification of resources; manipulation of resources through representations; self-descriptive messages; and, hypermedia as the engine of application state. These constraints will be discussed in Section 5.2.

In other words, in order to be doing something that Fielding considers RESTful, you have to be using hypermedia (that is to say, hypertext documents of some form) as the core of your application state. It might seem like this implies that you have to be building a Web application in order to be considered building something RESTful, so therefore all Web apps are RESTful by nature, but pay close attention to the wording: hypermedia must be the core of your application state. The way most Web apps are built today, HTML is clearly not the core of the state, but merely a way to render it. This is the accidental consequence of treating Web applications and desktop client applications as just pale reflections of one another.

The next section, 5.1.6 ("Layered System") again builds on the notion of stateless-server architecture to provide additional flexibility and power:

In order to further improve behavior for Internet-scale requirements, we add layered system constraints (Figure 5-7). As described in Section 3.4.2, the layered system style allows an architecture to be composed of hierarchical layers by constraining component behavior such that each component cannot "see" beyond the immediate layer with which they are interacting. By restricting knowledge of the system to a single layer, we place a bound on the overall system complexity and promote substrate independence. Layers can be used to encapsulate legacy services and to protect new services from legacy clients, simplifying components by moving infrequently used functionality to a shared intermediary. Intermediaries can also be used to improve system scalability by enabling load balancing of services across multiple networks and processors.

The primary disadvantage of layered systems is that they add overhead and latency to the processing of data, reducing user-perceived performance [32]. For a network-based system that supports cache constraints, this can be offset by the benefits of shared caching at intermediaries. Placing shared caches at the boundaries of an organizational domain can result in significant performance benefits [136]. Such layers also allow security policies to be enforced on data crossing the organizational boundary, as is required by firewalls [79].

The combination of layered system and uniform interface constraints induces architectural properties similar to those of the uniform pipe-and-filter style (Section 3.2.2). Although REST interaction is two-way, the large-grain data flows of hypermedia interaction can each be processed like a data-flow network, with filter components selectively applied to the data stream in order to transform the content as it passes [26]. Within REST, intermediary components can actively transform the content of messages because the messages are self-descriptive and their semantics are visible to intermediaries.

The potential of layered systems (itself not something that people building RESTful approaches seem to think much about) is only realized if the entirety of the state being transferred is self-descriptive and visible to the intermediaries--in other words, intermediaries can only be helpful and/or non-performance-inhibitive if they have free reign to make decisions based on the state they see being transferred. If something isn't present in the state being transferred, usually because there is server-side state being maintained, then they have to be concerned about silently changing the semantics of what is happening in the interaction, and intermediaries--and layers as a whole--become a liability. (Which is probably why so few systems seem to do it.)

And if the notion of visible, transported state is not yet made clear in his dissertation, Fielding dissects the discussion even further in section 5.2.1, "Data Elements". It's too long to reprint here in its entirety, and frankly, reading the whole thing is necessary to see the point of hypermedia and its place in the whole system. (The same could be said of the entire chapter, in fact.) But it's pretty clear, once you read the dissertation, that hypermedia/hypertext is a core, critical piece to the whole REST construction. Clients are expected, in a RESTful system, to have no preconceived notions of structure or relationship between resources, and discover all of that through the state of the hypertext documents that are sent back to them. In the HTML case, that discovery occurs inside the human brain; in the SOA/services case, that discovery is much harder to define and describe. RDF and Semantic Web ideas may be of some help here, but JSON can't, and simple XML can't, unless the client has some preconceived notion of what the XML structure looks like, which violates Fielding's rules:

A REST API should be entered with no prior knowledge beyond the initial URI (bookmark) and set of standardized media types that are appropriate for the intended audience (i.e., expected to be understood by any client that might use the API). From that point on, all application state transitions must be driven by client selection of server-provided choices that are present in the received representations or implied by the user’s manipulation of those representations. The transitions may be determined (or limited by) the client’s knowledge of media types and resource communication mechanisms, both of which may be improved on-the-fly (e.g., code-on-demand). [Failure here implies that out-of-band information is driving interaction instead of hypertext.]

An interesting "fuzzy gray area" here is whether or not the client's knowledge of a variant or schematic structure of XML could be considered to be a "standardized media type", but I'm willing to bet that Fielding will argue against it on the grounds that your application's XML schema is not "standardized" (unless, of course, it is, through a national/international/industry standardization effort).

But in case you'd missed it, let me summarize the past twenty or so paragraphs: hypermedia is a core requirement to being RESTful. If you ain't slinging all of your application state back and forth in hypertext, you ain't REST. Period. Fielding said it, he defined it, and that settles it.

Before the hate mail comes a-flyin', let me reiterate one vitally important point: if you're not doing REST, it doesn't mean that your API sucks. Fielding may have his definition of what REST is, and the idealist in me wants to remain true to his definitions of it (after all, if we can't agree on a common set of definitions, a common lexicon, then we can't really make much progress as an industry), but...

... the pragmatist in me keeps saying, "so what"?

Look, at the end of the day, if your system wants to misuse HTTP, abuse HTML, and carnally violate the principles of loose coupling and resource representation that underlie REST, who cares? Do you get special bonus points from the Apache Foundation if you use HTTP in the way Fielding intended? Will Microsoft and Oracle and Sun and IBM offer you discounts on your next software purchases if you create a REST-faithful system? Will the partisan politics in Washington, or the tribal conflicts in the Middle East, or even the widely-misnamed "REST-vs-SOAP" debates come to an end if you only figure out a way to make hypermedia the core engine of your application state?

Yeah, I didn't think so, either.

Point is, REST is just an architectural style. It is nothing more than another entry alongside such things as client-server, n-tier, distributed objects, service-oriented, and embedded systems. REST is just a tool for thinking about how to build an application, and it's high time we kick it off the pedastal on which we've placed it and let it come back down to earth with the rest of us mortals. HTTP is useful, but not sufficient, so solve our problems. REST is as well.

And at the end of the day, when we put one tool from our tool belt "above all others", we end up building some truly horrendous crap.

Recently, a blog reader asked me if I wasn't doing any speaking any more since I'd joined ThoughtWorks, and that's when I realized I'd been bad about updating my speaking calendar on the website. Sorry, all; no, ThoughtWorks didn't pull my conference visa or anything, I've just been bad about keeping it up to date. I'll fix that ASAP, but in the meantime, three events that I'll be at in the coming wintry months include:

Øredev 2008: 19 - 21 November, Malmoe, Sweden

Øredev will be a first for me, and I've ben invited to give a keynote there, along with a few technical sessions. I'm also told that .NET Rocks! will be on hand, and that they want to record a session, on whichever topic happens to cross the curious, crafty and cunning Carl, or the uh... the uh... sorry, Richard, there's just no good "R" adjectives I can use here. I mean, "rough" and "ready" don't exactly sound flattering in this context, right? Sorry, man.

In any event, I'm looking forward to this event, because it's a curious mix of technologies and ideas (agile, ALT.NET, Java, core .NET, languages, and so on), and because I've never been to Sweden before. One more European country, off my bucket list!

(Yes, I had to cut-and-paste the Ø wherever I needed it. *grin*)

DevTeach 2008: 1 - 5 December, Montreal, Quebec (Canada)

This has been one of my favorite shows since it began, way back in 2003, and a large part of that love has to do with the cast and crew of characters that I see there every year: Julie Lerman, Peter DeBetta, Carl and Richard (again!), Beth Massi, "Yag" Griver, Mario Cardinal and the rest of the Quebecois posse, Ayende, plus some new faces and friends, like Jessica Moss and James Kovacs. (Oh, and for the record, folks, for those of you who are still talking about it, the O/R-M smackdown of a year ago was staged. It was all fake. Ayende and I are really actually friends, we were paid a great deal of money by Carl and Richard to make it sound good, and in fact, we both agree that the only place anybody should really ever store their data is in an XML database.)

If you're near Montreal, and you're a .NET dev, you really owe it to yourself to check this show out.

Update: I just got this email from Jean-Rene, the guy who runs DevTeach:

Every attendees will get Visual Studio 2008 Pro, Expression Web 2 and Tech-Ed DEV set in their bag!

DevTeach believe that all developers need the right tool to be productive. This is what we will give you, free software, when you register to DevTeach or SQLTeach. Yes that right! We’re pleased to announce that we’re giving over a 1000$ of software when you register to DevTeach. You will find in your conference bag a version of Visual Studio 2008 Professional, ExpressionTM Web 2 and the Tech-Ed Conference DVD Set. Is this a good deal or what? DevTeach and SQLTeach are really the training you can’t get any other way.

Not bad. Not bad at all.

DeVoxx 2008: 8 - 12 December, Antwerp, Belgium

DeVoxx, the recently-renamed-formerly-named-JavaPolis conference, has brought me back to team up with Bill Venners to do a University session on Scala, and to record a few more of those Parlays videos that people can't seem to get enough of. Given that this show always seems to draw some of the Java world's best and brightest, I'm definitely looking forward to the chance to point the mike at somebody's grill and give 'em hell! Plus, I love Belgium, and I'm looking forward to getting back there. The fact that it's going to be the middle of winter is only a bonus, as... wait... Belgium, in the middle of winter? Whose bright idea was that?

(And finally, a show that Carl and Richard won't be at!)

Meanwhile, I promise to keep the "Upcoming Events" up to date for 2009. Seriously. I mean it.

Having created a Window7 VMWare image (which I then later cloned and installed the Windows7 SDK into, successfully, wahoo!), I turned to the Visual Studio 2010 bits they provided on the hard drive. Not surprisingly, though a bit frustratingly, they didn't give us an install image that I could put into a VMWare image of my own creation, but instead gave us a VPC with everything pre-installed in it.

I know that Microsoft prefers to promote its own products, and that it's probably a bit much to ask them to provide both a VMWare image and a VirtualPC image for these kind of pre-alpha things, but it's a bit of a pain considering that Virtual PC doesn't run anymore on the Mac, that I'm aware of. Please, Microsoft, a lot of .NET devs are carrying around MacBookPro machines these days, and if you're really focused on trying to get bits in the hands of developers, it would be quite the bold move to provide a VMWare image right next to the VPC image. Particularly since over half the drive was unused.

So... I don't want to have to carry around a PC (though I do at the moment) just to run VirtualPC just to be able to explore VS 2010, but fortunately VMWare provides a Converter application that can take a VPC image and flip it over to a VMWare image. Sounds like a plan. I fire up the Converter, point it at the VPC, and after the world's... slowest... wizard... takes... my... settings... and... begins... I discover that it will take upwards of 3 hours to convert. Dear God.

I decided to go to bed at that point.

When I woke up, the image had been converted successfully, but I wasn't quite finished yet. First of all, fire it up to make sure it runs, which it does without a problem, but at 640x480 in black-and-white mode (no, seriously, it's not much more than that). Install the VMWare Tools, reboot, and...

... the mouse cursor disappears. WTF?!?

Turns out this has been a nagging problem with several versions of VMWare over the years, and I vaguely remember running into the problem the last time I tried to create a Windows Server 2003/2008 image, too. Ugh. Hunting around the Web doesn't reveal an easy solution, but a couple of things do show up a few times: disconnect the CD-ROM, change the mouse pointer acceleration, delete the VMWare Mouse driver and let Windows rediscover the standard PS/2 mouse driver, or change the display hardware acceleration.

Not being really interested in debugging the problem (I know, my chance at making everybody's life better is now forever lost), I decided to take a bit of a shotgun approach to the problem. I explicitly deleted the VMWare Mouse driver, fiddled with the display settings (including resizing it to a more respectable 1400x1050), turned display hardware acceleration down, couldn't find mouse hardware acceleration settings, allowed it to reboot, and...

... yay. I have a mouse pointer again.

Now I have a VS2010 image on my Drive-o'-Virtual-Machines, and with it I plan on exploring the VS2010/C# 4.0/C++ 10/VB 10 bits some more. I fire up Visual Studio 2010, intending to poke around C# 4.0's new "dynamic" keyword and see if and how it builds on top of the DLR (as a few people have suggested in comments in prior posts). VS comes up pretty quickly (not bad for a pre-alpha), the new interface seems snappy, and I create the ubiquitous "ConsoleApplicationX" C# app.

Wait a minute...

Something niggled at the back of my head, and I went back to File | New Project, and ... something's missing.

There's no "Visual F#" tab. There's an item in the "Project types:" box on the left for Visual Basic, Visual C#, Visual C++, WiX, Modeling Projects, Database Projects, Other Project Types, and Test Projects, but no Visual F#. (And no, it doesn't show up under "Other Project Types" either, I checked.) Considering that my understanding was that F# was going to ship with VS 2010, I'm a little puzzled as to its absence. Hopefully this is just a temporary oversight.

In the meantime, I'm off to play with "dynamic" a bit more and see what comes out of it. But guys, please, let's see some F# love out of the box? Surely, if you can ship WiX with it, shipping F# can't be hard?

PDC 2008 in LA is over now, and like most PDCs, it definitely didn't disappoint on the technical front--Microsoft tossed out a whole slew of new technologies, ideas, releases, and prototypes, all with the eye towards getting bits (in this case, a Western Digital 160 GB USB hard drive) out to the developer community and getting back feedback, either through the usual channels or, more recently, the blogosphere.

These are the things I think I think about this past PDC:

• Windows 7 will be an interesting thing to watch--they handed out DVDs in both 32- and 64-bit versions, and it's somewhat reminiscent of the Longhorn DVDs of the last PDC. If you recall, Longhorn (what eventually became known as Vista) looked surprisingly good--if a bit unstable, something common to any release this early--for a while, then Vista itself pretty much fell flat. I think it will be interesting, as a social experiment, to look at what people say about Windows 7 now, compare it to what was said about Vista back in 2004 (which is I think when the last PDC was), and then compare what people say 1, 2 and 3 years after the PDC release.
• Azure dominated a lot of the focus, commensurate with the growing interest/hype around "the cloud". All of this sounds suspiciously familiar to me, thinking back to the early days of SOAP/WSDL, and the intense pressure for Web services to revolutionize IT as we know it. This didn't happen, largely for technical reasons at first (incompatibilities between toolkits most of all), then because people treated it as CORBA++ or DCOM-with-angle-brackets. Azure and "cloud computing" have a different problem: clear definition of purpose. I think too many people have no idea what "the cloud" really is for this to be something to pay much attention to just yet.
• Conference get-togethers and parties are becoming more and more lavish each year, as the various product teams challenge one another for the coveted title of The "Dude, were you there last night? It was amazing!" Party of PDC. For my money, that party was the party at the J Lounge on Wednesday night, complete with three floors of fun, including a wall-projected image of Rock Band, but--here's the rub--I couldn't tell you which team actually hosted the party. There was a Microsoft Dynamics CRM poster up in the middle of the gaming floor (bunch of XBox 360s, though not networked together, which I found disappointing), so I'm assuming it had something to do with them, but.... I think Microsoft product teams may want to consider saving some budget and instead of hiring six LA Lakers Cheerleaders to sit on a couch and allow drooling geeks to take pictures with them (no touching!), use the money to make the party--and the hosts--stick in my mind more effectively, or at least use it to hand out technical data on whatever it is they're building.
• The vendor floor competition for attention is getting a little cutthroat. DevExpress stole the show this year, importing--no joke--an actor, "Mini-Me", Vern, to essentially echo (badly) anything Mark Miller (dressed, of course, as Austin Powers' arch-nemesis Dr. Evil) tried to say about the most recent version of CodeRush. Granted, Mark's new "do" (and the absurdly large head that was hiding underneath) makes it easy for him to do a good Dr. Evil impression, but other than that, there was really nothing parallel in the situation--despite Mark's insistence on writing code with evil Flying Spaghetti Monsters or what not in it. I think if you're a vendor and you want to make a splash at PDC, you think long and hard about an effective tie-in, like Infragistics' clever "I flew 1500 miles for this T-shirt" they were giving away.
• The language world was a bit abuzz at the barely-concealed C# 4.0 features, mostly centering around the new "dynamic" keyword and the C# REPL loop capabilities, but noticeably absent was any similar kind of talk or buzz around VB 10. Even C++ got more attention than VB did, with a presentation clearly intending to call out a direct reference to Visual C++'s heyday, "Visual C++: Why 10 is the new 6". Conversations I had with a few Microsofties make it pretty clear that VB is now the red-headed stepchild of the .NET language family, and that fact is going to start making itself widely felt through the rest of the ecosystem before long, particularly now that rumors are beginning to circulate that pretty much all the "gifted kids" that were on the VB team have gone to find other places to exercise their intellect and innovation, such as the Oslo team. I think Microsoft is going to find itself in an uncomfortable position soon, of trying to kill VB off without appearing like they are trying to kill VB off, lest they create another "VB revolution" like the one in 2001 when unmanaged VB'ers ("Classic VBers"?) looked at VB.NET and collectively puked.
• Speaking of collective revolution, anybody remember Visual FoxPro? Those guys are still kicking, and they were always a small fraction of the developer community, comparatively against VB, at least. I think Microsoft is in trouble here, of their own making, for not defining distinct and clearly differentiated roles for Visual Basic and C#.
• The DLR is quickly moving into a position of high importance in my mind, and the fact that it now builds on top of expression trees (from C# 3.0/LINQ) and builds its trees in such a way that they look almost identical to what a corresponding C# or VB tree would look like means that the DLR is about a half-step away from becoming the most critical part of the .NET ecosystem, second only to the CLR itself. I think that while certain Microsoft releases, like Oslo, PowerShell, C# or VB, won't adopt the DLR as a core component to their implementation, developers looking to explore the DSL space will find the DLR a very happy place to be, particularly in combination with F# Parser Expression Grammars.
• Speaking of F#, it's pretty clear that it was the developer darling--if not the media darling--of the show. The F# Hands-on-Lab looked to be one of the more popular ones used there, and every time I or my co-author, Amanda Laucher, talked with somebody who didn't already know we were working on F# in a Nutshell, they were asking questions about it and trying to understand its role in the world. I think the "cool kids" of the development community are going to come to check out F#, find that it can do a lot of what the O-O minded C# and VB can do, discover that the functional approach works well in certain scenarios, and start looking to use that on their new projects.
• I think that if the Microsoft languages family were Weasley family from Harry Potter, C++ would be one of the two older brothers (probably Bill or Charlie, the cool older brothers who've gone on to make their name and don't need to impress anybody any more), Visual Basic would be Percy (desperate for validation and respect), C# would be Ron (cleary an up-and-comer in the world, even if he was a little awkward while growing up), and F# would be Ginny (the spunky one who clearly charts her own path despite her initial shyness, her accidental involvement in a Voldemortian scheme and her parents' and big brothers' interference in her life). Oslo, of course, is Professor Snape--we can't be sure if he's a good guy or a bad guy until the last book.
• Continuing that analogy, by the way, I think Java is clearly Hermione: wickedly book smart, but sometimes too clever by half.

Overall, PDC was an amazing show, and there's clearly a lot of stuff to track. I personally plan to take a deep dive into Oslo, and will probably blog about what I find, but in the meantime, remember that all of the PDC bits that we got on the hard drives are available through the various DevCenters (or so I've been told), so have a look. There's a lot more there than just what I mentioned above.

Update: Lisa Feigenbaum emailed me with a correction: there was a session on VB 10 at PDC, and I simply missed it in the schedule. In fact, she was very subtle about it, simply asking me, "Did you make it to the VB talk?" and posted this URL along with it. Lisa, I stand corrected. Having said that, though, I still stand by the other points of that piece: that the buzz I was hearing (which may very well have simply been the social circles I run in, I'll be the first to admit it, but I can only speak to my experience here and am very willing to be told I'm full of poopie on this one) was all C#, no VB, and that it bothers me that notable members of the VB team have departed for other parts of the company. Please, nothing would make me happier than to see VB stand as a full and equal partner in the .NET family of languages, but right now, it really still feels like the red-headed stepchild. Please, prove me wrong.

The full list is here. It's a pretty prestigious group--and I'm totally floored that I'm there next to some pretty big names.

In homage to Ms. Sally Fields, of so many years ago... "You like me, you really like me". Having somebody come up to me at a conference and tell me how much they like my blog is second on my list of "fun things to happen to me at a conference", right behind having somebody come up to me at a conference and tell me how much they like my blog, except for that one entry, where I said something totally ridiculous (and here's why) ....

What I find most fascinating about the list was the means by which it was constructed--the various calculations behind page rank, technorati rating, and so on. Very cool stuff.

Perhaps it's trite to say it, but it's still true: readers are what make writing blogs worthwhile. Thanks to all of you.

As Joel points out, we've made a draft of the SSCLI 2.0 Internals book available for download (via his blog). Rather than tell you all about the book, which Joel summarizes quite well, instead I thought I'd tell you about the process by which the book came to be.

Editor's note: if you have no interest in the process by which a book can get done, skip the rest of this blog entry.

One thing that readers will note that's different about this version of "the Rotor book" is that it's not being done through one of the traditional publishers. This is deliberate. As Joel and I talk about on the .NET Rocks! show we did together, the first Rotor book was on the first version of Rotor, which shipped shortly after the .NET 1.1 bits shipped to customers. That was back in the summer of 2001. Dave, Geoff and I shipped the book, I did a few conference talks on Rotor for the relatively few people who had an interest in what was going on "under the hood" of the CLR, and then we all sort of parted ways. (Dave retired from Microsoft entirely shortly thereafter, in order "to focus on the two things that matter in life: making music and making wine", as he put it.) Mission accomplished, we moved on.

Meanwhile, as we all knew would happen, the world moved on--Whidbey (.NET 2.0) shipped, and with it came a whole slew of CLR enhancements, most notably generics. Unlike how generics happened in the JVM, CLR generics are carried through all the way to the type system, and as a result, a lot of what we said in the first Rotor book was instantly rendered obsolete. Granted, one could always grab the Gyro patch for Rotor and see what generics would have looked like, but even that was pretty much rendered obsolete by the emergence of the SSCLI 2.0 drop, bringing the Rotor code up to date with the Whidbey production CLR release.

Except the book was, to be blunt about it, left behind.

Speaking honestly, the book never broke any sales records. Sure, for a while there it was the #1 best-selling book (in Redmond, WA, to my total shock and surprise) on Amazon, but we never had the kind of best-seller success that that of, say, Programming Ruby or pick-your-favorite-ASP.NET book. In the book publishing world, this was kind of the moral equivalent to watching your neighbors' slide show of their vacation: boring for most people not in the pictures, unless you were really interested in either the place they were visiting or what they did there. Most of our audience were either people working on the CLR itself (hence all the copies sold in Redmond, get it?), people who were researching on the CLR (such as the various Rotor research projects that came over a few years after its release), or people who just had that itch to "get wonky with it" and learn how some of the structures worked. Granted, a lot of what those people in the last category learned turned out to be pretty helpful in the Real World, but it was a payoff that came with a pretty non-trivial learning curve.

Fast-forward a few years, to the end of calendar year 2005.

By this point, .NET 2.0 has been out in production form for a bit, and Mark Lewin, then of Microsoft University Relations (I think that was his job, but to be honest my recollection on that point is kinda fuzzy) approached me: Microsoft was interested in seeing a second edition of the book out, to keep the Rotor community up to date with what was going on in the state of the art in the CLR. Was I interested? Sure, but the rules surrounding a multi-author book and subsequent editions are pretty clear: everybody has to be given right of first refusal. Thus a two-fold task was under way: find a co-author (preferably somebody from the CLR team, since my skills had never really been in navigating the Rotor source code in the first place, and I hadn't really spent a significant amount of time in the code since 2001), and get Geoff and Dave to indicate--in a very proper legal fashion--that they were passing on the second edition.

Ugh. Lawyers. Contracts. Bleah.

John Osborn then broke the bad news: OReilly wasn't interested in doing a second edition. I couldn't really blame them, since the first hadn't broken any kind of sales record, but I was a bit bummed because I thought this was the end of the road.

Mark Lewin to the rescue. Apparently his part of Microsoft really wanted this book out, to the point where they were willing to fund the effort, if I and my co-author were still interested. Sure, that sounded like a workable idea. And once the book was done, maybe we could publish it through MSPress, if that sounded like a good idea to me. Sure, that sounded good. Then Mark dropped the suggestion that maybe I could talk to Joel Pobar, former CLR geek extraordinaire, to see if he was interested. Joel had impressed me back when we'd briefly touched bases during the first book-writing experience, so yeah, sure, that sounded like a good idea. He was on board pretty quickly, and so we had the first step out of the way.

Next, we had to get OReilly to release their copyright on the first book, so we (and possibly MSPress) could work on and publish the second edition. This turned out to be a huge part of the time between then and now, not owing to any one party's deliberate attempt to derail the process, but just because copies of contracts had to be sent to the original three authors (myself, Stutz and Geoff) to sign over our rights with OReilly to a Creative Commons License, then copies had to be sent to everybody else so all the signatures could appear on one document, and so on.

Did I say it already? Ugh. Lawyers. Contracts. Bleah.

Then, we had to get a contract from Microsoft signed, and that meant more contracts flying back and forth across the fax lines, and then later the US (and Australian) postal system, and that was more delays as the same round of signatures had to be exchanged.

Just for the record: Ugh. Lawyers. Contracts. Bleah.

Finally, though, the die was cast, the authors were ready to go, and.... Hey, does anybody have the latest soft copy of the Word docs we used from the first edition? A quick email to John (Osborn) took longer than we thought, as OReilly tried to find the post-QA docs for us to work from. (I had my own copies, of course, but they were pre-QA, and thus not really what we wanted to start from.) More rounds of emails to try and track those down, so we can get started. Oh, and while we're at it, can we get the figures/graphics, too? They're not in the manuscript directly, so.... Oh, wait, does anybody know how to read .EPS files?

Then began the actual writing process, or, to be more precise, the revision process. We decided on a process similar to the way the first book had been written: Joel, being the "subject matter expert", would take a first pass on the text, and sketch in the rough outlines of what needed to be said. I would then take the prose, polish it up (which in many cases didn't require a whole lot of work, Joel being a great writer in his own right) and rearrange sections as necessary to make it flow more easily, as well as flesh out certain sections that didn't require a former position on the CLR team to write. Joel would then have a look at what I wrote, and assuming I didn't get it completely wrong, would sign off on it, and the chapter/section/paragraph/whatever was done.

And now we're in the process of doing that cosmetic cleanup that's part of the overtime period in book-writing, including generating the table of contents and index, since, it turns out, we'd rather publish it ourselves than through MSPress (which they're OK with). So, readers will have a choice: get the free download from Microsoft's website (once we're done, which should be "real soon now") and read it in soft-copy, or buy it off of Amazon in "treeware version", which will put a modest amount of money into Joel's and my collective pocket (once the relatively modest expenses of self-publishing are covered, that is).

This will be my first experience with self-publishing (as it is for Joel, too), so I'm eager to see how the whole things turns out. One thing I will warn the prospective self-publisher, though: do not underestimate the time you will spend doing those things the editorial/QA/copyedit pass normally handles for you, because it's kind of a pain in the *ss to do it yourself. Still, it's worth it, particularly if you're having a hard time selling your book to a publisher who, for reasons of economy of scale, don't want to publish a niche book (like this one).

Anyway, like many of my blog postings, this post has gone on long enough, so I'll sign off here with a "go read the draft", even if you're a Java or other execution engine/virtual machine kind of developer--seeing the nuts and bolts of a complex execution engine in action is a pretty cool exercise.

Oh, and if anybody's interested in doing a similar kind of effort around the OpenJDK (once it ships), let me know, 'cuz I'm a glutton for punishment....

For those of you who were at the Cinncinnati NFJS show, please continue on to the next blog entry in your reader--you've already heard this. For those of you who weren't, then allow me to make the announcement:

Hi. My name's Ted Neward, and I am now a ThoughtWorker.

After four months of discussions, interviews, more discussions and more interviews, I can finally say that ThoughtWorks and I have come to a meeting of the minds, and starting 3 September I will be a Principal Consultant at ThoughtWorks. My role there will be to consult, write, mentor, architect and speak on Java, .NET, XML Services (and maybe even a little Ruby), not to mention help ThoughtWorks' clients achieve IT success in other general ways.

Yep, I'm basically doing the same thing I've been doing for the last five years. Except now I'm doing it with a TW logo attached to my name.

By the way, ThoughtWorkers get to choose their own titles, and I'm curious to know what readers think my title should be. Send me your suggestions, and if one really strikes home, I'll use it and update this entry to reflect the choice. I have a few ideas, but I'm finding that other people can be vastly more creative than I, and I'd love to have a title that rivals Neal's "Meme Wrangler" in coolness.

Oh, and for those of you who were thinking this, "Seat Warmer" has already been taken, from what I understand.

Honestly, this is a connection that's been hovering at the forefront of my mind for several years. I like ThoughtWorks' focus on success, their willingness to explore new ideas (both methodologies and technologies), their commitment to the community, their corporate values, and their overall attitude of "work hard, play hard". There have definitely been people who came away from ThoughtWorks with a negative impression of the company, but they're the minority. Any company that encourages T-shirts and jeans, XBoxes in the office, and wants to promote good corporate values is a winner in my book. In short, ThoughtWorks is, in many ways, the consulting company that I would want to build, if I were going to build a consulting firm. I'm not a wild fan of the travel commitments, mind you, but I am definitely no stranger to travel, we've got some ideas about how I can stay at home a bit more, and frankly I've been champing at the bit to get injected into more agile and team projects, so it feels like a good tradeoff. Plus, I get to think about languages and platforms in a more competitive and hostile way--not that TW is a competitive and hostile place, mind you, but in that my new fellow ThoughtWorkers will not let stupid thoughts stand for long, and will quickly find the holes in my arguments even faster, thus making the arguments as a whole that much stronger... or shooting them down because they really are stupid. (Either outcome works pretty well for me.)

What does this mean to the rest of you? Not much change, really--I'm still logging lots of hours at conferences, I'm still writing (and blogging, when the muse strikes), and I'm still available for consulting/mentoring/speaking; the big difference is that now I come with a thousand-strong developers of proven capability at my back, not to mention two of the more profound and articulate speakers in the industry (in Neal and Martin) as peers. So if you've got some .NET, Java, or Ruby projects you're thinking about, and you want a team to come in and make it happen, you know how to reach me.

Another DZone newsletter crosses my Inbox, and again I feel compelled to comment. Not so much in the uber-aggressive style of my previous attempt, since I find myself more on the fence on this one, but because I think it's a worthwhile debate and worth calling out.

The article in question is "5 Reasons Why You Don't Want A Jack-of-all-Trades Developer", by Rebecca Murphey. In it, she talks about the all-too-common want-ad description that appears on job sites and mailing lists:

I've spent the last couple of weeks trolling Craigslist and have been shocked at the number of ads I've found that seem to be looking for an entire engineering team rolled up into a single person. Descriptions like this aren't at all uncommon:

Candidates must have 5 years experience defining and developing data driven web sites and have solid experience with ASP.NET, HTML, XML, JavaScript, CSS, Flash, SQL, and optimizing graphics for web use. The candidate must also have project management skills and be able to balance multiple, dynamic, and sometimes conflicting priorities. This position is an integral part of executing our web strategy and must have excellent interpersonal and communication skills.

Her disdain for this practice is the focus of the rest of the article:

Now I don't know about you, but if I were building a house, I wouldn't want an architect doing the work of a carpenter, or the foundation guy doing the work of an electrician. But ads like the one above are suggesting that a single person can actually do all of these things, and the simple fact is that these are fundamentally different skills. The foundation guy may build a solid base, but put him in charge of wiring the house and the whole thing could, well, burn down. When it comes to staffing a web project or product, the principle isn't all that different -- nor is the consequence.

I'll admit, when I got to this point in the article, I was fully ready to start the argument right here and now--developers have to have a well-rounded collection of skills, since anecdotal evidence suggests that trying to go the route of programming specialization (along the lines of medical specialization) isn't going to work out, particularly given the shortage of programmers in the industry right now to begin with. But she goes on to make an interesting point:

The thing is, the more you know, the more you find out you don't know. A year ago I'd have told you I could write PHP/MySQL applications, and do the front-end too; now that I've seen what it means to be truly skilled at the back-end side of things, I realize the most accurate thing I can say is that I understand PHP applications and how they relate to my front-end development efforts. To say that I can write them myself is to diminish the good work that truly skilled PHP/MySQL developers are doing, just as I get a little bent when a back-end developer thinks they can do my job.

She really caught me eye (and interest) with that first statement, because it echoes something Bjarne Stroustrup told me almost 15 years ago, in an email reply sent back to me (in response to my rather audacious cold-contact email inquiry about the costs and benefits of writing a book): "The more you know, the more you know you don't know". What I think also caught my eye--and, I admit it, earned respect--was her admission that she maybe isn't as good at something as she thought she was before. This kind of reflective admission is a good thing (and missing far too much from our industry, IMHO), because it leads not only to better job placements for us as well as the companies that want to hire us, but also because the more honest we can be about our own skills, the more we can focus efforts on learning what needs to be learned in order to grow.

She then turns to her list of 5 reasons, phrased more as a list of suggestions to companies seeking to hire programming talent; my comments are in italics:

So to all of those companies who are writing ads seeking one magical person to fill all of their needs, I offer a few caveats before you post your next Craigslist ad:

1. If you're seeking a single person with all of these skills, make sure you have the technical expertise to determine whether a person's skills match their resume. Outsource a tech interview if you need to. Any developer can tell horror stories about inept predecessors, but when a front-end developer like myself can read PHP and think it's appalling, that tells me someone didn't do a very good job of vetting and got stuck with a programmer who couldn't deliver on his stated skills.

(T: I cannot stress this enough--the technical interview process practiced at most companies is a complete sham and travesty, and usually only succeeds in making sure the company doesn't hire a serial killer, would-be terrorist, or financially destitute freeway-underpass resident. I seriously think most companies should outsource the technical interview process entirely.)

2. A single source for all of these skills is a single point of failure on multiple fronts. Think long and hard about what it will mean to your project if the person you hire falls short in some aspect(s), and about the mistakes that will have to be cleaned up when you get around to hiring specialized people. I have spent countless days cleaning up after back-end developers who didn't understand the nuances and power of CSS, or the difference between a div, a paragraph, a list item, and a span. Really.

(T: I'm not as much concerned about the single point of failure argument here, to be honest. Developers will always have "edges" to what they know, and companies will constantly push developers to that edge for various reasons, most of which seem to be financial--"Why pay two people to do what one person can do?" is a really compelling argument to the CFO, particularly when measured against an unquantifiable, namely the quality of the project.)

3. Writing efficient SQL is different from efficiently producing web-optimized graphics. Administering a server is different from troubleshooting cross-browser issues. Trust me. All are integral to the performance and growth of your site, and so you're right to want them all -- just not from the same person. Expecting quality results in every area from the same person goes back to the foundation guy doing the wiring. You're playing with fire.

(T: True, but let's be honest about something here. It's not so much that the company wants to play with fire, or that the company has a manual entitled "Running a Dilbert Company" that says somewhere inside it, "Thou shouldst never hire more than one person to run the IT department", but that the company is dealing with limited budgets and headcount. If you only have room for one head under the budget, you want the maximum for that one head. And please don't tell me how wrong that practice of headcount really is--you're preaching to the choir on that one. The people you want to preach to are the Jack Welches of the world, who apparently aren't listening to us very much.)

4. Asking for a laundry list of skills may end up deterring the candidates who will be best able to fill your actual need. Be precise in your ad: about the position's title and description, about the level of skill you're expecting in the various areas, about what's nice to have and what's imperative. If you're looking to fill more than one position, write more than one ad; if you don't know exactly what you want, try harder to figure it out before you click the publish button.

(T: Asking people to think before publishing? Heresy! Truthfully, I don't think it's a question of not knowing what they want, it's more trying to find what they want. I've seen how some of these same job ads get generated, and it's usually because a programmer on the team has left, and they had some degree of skill in all of those areas. What the company wants, then, is somebody who can step into exactly what that individual was doing before they handed in their resignation, but ads like, "Candidate should look at Joe Smith's resume on Dice.com (http://...) and have exactly that same skill set. Being named Joe Smith a desirable 'plus', since then we won't have to have the sysadmins create a new login handle for you." won't attract much attention. Frankly, what I've found most companies want is to just not lose the programmer in the first place.)

5. If you really do think you want one person to do the task of an entire engineering team, prepare yourself to get someone who is OK at a bunch of things and not particularly good at any of them. Again: the more you know, the more you find out you don't know. I regularly team with a talented back-end developer who knows better than to try to do my job, and I know better than to try to do his. Anyone who represents themselves as being a master of front-to-back web development may very well have no idea just how much they don't know, and could end up imperiling your product or project -- front to back -- as a result.

(T: Or be prepared to pay a lot of money for somebody who is an expert at all of those things, or be prepared to spend a lot of time and money growing somebody into that role. Sometimes the exact right thing to do is have one person do it all, but usually it's cheaper to have a small team work together.)

(On a side note, I find it amusing that she seems to consider PHP a back-end skill, but I don't want to sound harsh doing so--that's just a matter of perspective, I suppose. (I can just imagine the guffaws from the mainframe guys when I talk about EJB, message-queue and Spring systems being "back-end", too.) To me, the whole "web" thing is front-end stuff, whether you're the one generating the HTML from your PHP or servlet/JSP or ASP.NET server-side engine, or you're the one generating the CSS and graphics images that are sent back to the browser by said server-side engine. If a user sees something I did, it's probably because something bad happened and they're looking at a stack trace on the screen.)

The thing I find interesting is that HR hiring practices and job-writing skills haven't gotten any better in the near-to-two-decades I've been in this industry. I can still remember a fresh-faced wet-behind-the-ears Stroustrup-2nd-Edition-toting job candidate named Neward looking at job placement listings and finding much the same kind of laundry list of skills, including those with the impossible number of years of experience. (In 1995, I saw an ad looking for somebody who had "10 years of C++ experience", and wondering, "Gosh, I guess they're looking to hire Stroustrup or Lippmann", since those two are the only people who could possibly have filled that requirement at the time. This was right before reading the ad that was looking for 5 years of Java experience, or the ad below it looking for 15 years of Delphi....)

Given that it doesn't seem likely that HR departments are going to "get a clue" any time soon, it leaves us with an interesting question: if you're a developer, and you're looking at these laundry lists of requirements, how do you respond?

Here's my own list of things for programmers/developers to consider over the next five to ten years:

1. These "laundry list" ads are not going away any time soon. We can rant and rail about the stupidity of HR departments and hiring managers all we want, but the basic fact is, this is the way things are going to work for the forseeable future, it seems. Changing this would require a "sea change" across the industry, and sea change doesn't happen overnight, or even within the span of a few years. So, to me, the right question to ask isn't, "How do I change the industry to make it easier for me to find a job I can do?", but "How do I change what I do when looking for a job to better respond to what the industry is doing?"
2. Exclusively focusing on a single area of technology is the Kiss of Death. If all you know is PHP, then your days are numbered. I mean no disrespect to the PHP developers of the world--in fact, were it not too ambiguous to say it, I would rephrase that as "If all you know is X, your days are numbered." There is no one technical skill that will be as much in demand in ten years as it is now. Technologies age. Industry evolves. Innovations come along that completely change the game and leave our predictions of a few years ago in the dust. Bill Gates (he of the "640K comment") has said, and I think he's spot on with this, "We routinely overestimate where we will be in five years, and vastly underestimate where we will be in ten." If you put all your eggs in the PHP basket, then when PHP gets phased out in favor of (insert new "hotness" here), you're screwed. Unless, of course, you want to wait until you're the last man standing, which seems to have paid off well for the few COBOL developers still alive.... but not so much for the Algol, Simula, or RPG folks....
3. Assuming that you can stop learning is the Kiss of Death. Look, if you want to stop learning at some point and coast on what you know, be prepared to switch industries. This one, for the forseeable future, is one that's predicated on radical innovation and constant change. This means we have to accept that everything is in a constant state of flux--you can either rant and rave against it, or roll with it. This doesn't mean that you don't have to look back, though--anybody who's been in this industry for more than 10 years has seen how we keep reinventing the wheel, particularly now that the relationship between Ruby and Smalltalk has been put up on the big stage, so to speak. Do yourself a favor: learn stuff that's already "done", too, because it turns out there's a lot of lessons we can learn from those who came before us. "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" (George Santanyana). Case in point: if you're trying to get into XML services, spend some time learning CORBA and DCOM, and compare how they do things against WSDL and SOAP. What's similar? What's different? Do some Googling and see if you can find comparison articles between the two, and what XML services were supposed to "fix" from the previous two. You don't have to write a ton of CORBA or DCOM code to see those differences (though writing at least a little CORBA/DCOM code will probably help.)
4. Find a collection of people smarter than you. Chad Fowler calls this "Being the worst player in any band you're in" (My Job Went to India (and All I Got Was This Lousy Book), Pragmatic Press). The more you surround yourself with smart people, the more of these kinds of things (tools, languages, etc) you will pick up merely by osmosis, and find yourself more attractive to those kind of "laundry list" job reqs. If nothing else, it speaks well to you as an employee/consultant if you can say, "I don't know the answer to that question, but I know people who do, and I can get them to help me".
5. Learn to be at least self-sufficient in related, complementary technologies. We see laundry list ads in "clusters". Case in point: if the company is looking for somebody to work on their website, they're going to rattle off a list of five or so things they want he/she to know--HTML, CSS, XML, JavaScript and sometimes Flash (or maybe now Silverlight), in addition to whatever server-side technology they're using (ASP.NET, servlets, PHP, whatever). This is a pretty reasonable request, depending on the depth of each that they want you to know. Here's the thing: the company does not want the guy who says he knows ASP.NET (and nothing but ASP.NET), when asked to make a small HTML or CSS change, to turn to them and say, "I'm sorry, that's not in my job description. I only know ASP.NET. You'll have to get your HTML guy to make that change." You should at least be comfortable with the basic syntax of all of the above (again, with possible exception for Flash, which is the odd man out in that job ad that started this piece), so that you can at least make sure the site isn't going to break when you push your changes live. In the case of the ad above, learn the things that "surround" website development: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Flash, Java applets, HTTP (!!), TCP/IP, server operating systems, IIS or Apache or Tomcat or some other server engine (including the necessary admin skills to get them installed and up and running), XML (since it's so often used for configuration), and so on. These are all "complementary" skills to being an ASP.NET developer (or a servlet/JSP developer). If you're a C# or Java programmer, learn different programming languages, a la F# (.NET) or Scala (Java), IronRuby (.NET) or JRuby (Java), and so on. If you're a Ruby developer, learn either a JVM language or a CLR language, so you can "plug in" more easily to the large corporate enterprise when that call comes.
6. Learn to "read" the ad at a higher level. It's often possible to "read between the lines" and get an idea of what they're looking for, even before talking to anybody at the company about the job. For example, I read the ad that started this piece, and the internal dialogue that went on went something like this:

   Candidates must have 5 years experience (No entry-level developers wanted, they want somebody who can get stuff done without having their hand held through the process) defining and developing data driven (they want somebody who's comfortable with SQL and databases) web sites (wait for it, the "web cluster" list is coming) and have solid experience with ASP.NET (OK, they're at least marginally a Microsoft shop, that means they probably also want some Windows Server and IIS experience), HTML, XML, JavaScript, CSS (the "web cluster", knew that was coming), Flash (OK, I wonder if this is because they're building rich internet/intranet apps already, or just flirting with the idea?), SQL (knew that was coming), and optimizing graphics for web use (OK, this is another wrinkle--this smells of "we don't want our graphics-heavy website to suck"). The candidate must also have project management skills (in other words, "You're on your own, sucka!"--you're not part of a project team) and be able to balance multiple, dynamic, and sometimes conflicting priorities (in other words, "You're own your own trying to balance between the CTO's demands and the CEO's demands, sucka!", since you're not part of a project team; this also probably means you're not moving into an existing project, but doing more maintenance work on an existing site). This position is an integral part of executing our web strategy (in other words, this project has public visibility and you can't let stupid errors show up on the website and make us all look bad) and must have excellent interpersonal and communication skills (what job doesn't need excellent interpersonal and communication skills?).

   See what I mean? They want an ASP.NET dev. My guess is that they're thinking a lot about Silverlight, since Silverlight's closest competitor is Flash, and so theoretically an ASP.NET-and-Flash dev would know how to use Silverlight well. Thus, I'm guessing that the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript don't need to be "Adept" level, nor even "Master" level, but "Journeyman" is probably necessary, and maybe you could get away with "Apprentice" at those levels, if you're working as part of a team. The SQL part will probably have to be "Journeyman" level, the XML could probably be just "Apprentice", since I'm guessing it's only necessary for the web.config files to control the ASP.NET configuration, and the "optimizing web graphics", push-come-to-shove, could probably be forgiven if you've had some experience at doing some performance tuning of a website.
7. Be insightful. I know, every interview book ever written says you should "ask questions", but what they're really getting at is "Demonstrate that you've thought about this company and this position". Demonstrating insight about the position and the company and technology as a whole is a good way to prove that you're a neck above the other candidates, and will help keep the job once you've got it.
8. Be honest about what you know. Let's be honest--we've all met developers who claimed they were "experts" in a particular tool or technology, and then painfully demonstrated how far from "expert" status they really were. Be honest about yourself: claim your skills on a simple four-point scale. "Apprentice" means "I read a book on it" or "I've looked at it", but "there's no way I could do it on my own without some serious help, and ideally with a Master looking over my shoulder". "Journeyman" means "I'm competent at it, I know the tools/technology"; or, put another way, "I can do 80% of what anybody can ask me to do, and I know how to find the other 20% when those situations arise". "Master" means "I not only claim that I can do what you ask me to do with it, I can optimize systems built with it, I can make it do things others wouldn't attempt, and I can help others learn it better". Masters are routinely paired with Apprentices as mentors or coaches, and should expect to have this as a major part of their responsibilities. (Ideally, anybody claiming "architect" in their title should be a Master at one or two of the core tools/technologies used in their system; or, put another way, architects should be very dubious about architecting with something they can't reasonably claim at least Journeyman status in.) "Adept", shortly put, means you are not only fully capable of pulling off anything a Master can do, but you routinely take the tool/technology way beyond what anybody else thinks possible, or you know the depth of the system so well that you can fix bugs just by thinking about them. With your eyes closed. While drinking a glass of water. Seriously, Adept status is not something to claim lightly--not only had you better know the guys who created the thing personally, but you should have offered up suggestions on how to make it better and had one or more of them accepted.
9. Demonstrate that you have relevant skills beyond what they asked for. Look at the ad in question: they want an ASP.NET dev, so any familiarity with IIS, Windows Server, SQL Server, MSMQ, COM/DCOM/COM+, WCF/Web services, SharePoint, the CLR, IronPython, or IronRuby should be listed prominently on your resume, and brought up at least twice during your interview. These are (again) complementary technologies, and even if the company doesn't have a need for those things right now, it's probably because Joe didn't know any of those, and so they couldn't use them without sending Joe to a training class. If you bring it up during the interview, it can also show some insight on your part: "So, any questions for us?" "Yes, are you guys using Windows Server 2008, or 2003, for your back end?" "Um, we're using 2003, why do you ask?" "Oh, well, when I was working as an ASP.NET dev for my previous company, we moved up to 2008 because it had the Froobinger Enhancement, which let us...., and I was just curious if you guys had a similar need." Or something like that. Again, be entirely honest about what you know--if you helped the server upgrade by just putting the CDs into the drive and punching the power button, then say as much.
10. Demonstrate that you can talk to project stakeholders and users. Communication is huge. The era of the one-developer team is long since over--you have to be able to meet with project champions, users, other developers, and so on. If you can't do that without somebody being offended at your lack of tact and subtlety (or your lack of personal hygiene), then don't expect to get hired too often.
11. Demonstrate that you understand the company, its business model, and what would help it move forward. Developers who actually understand business are surprisingly and unfortunately rare. Be one of the rare ones, and you'll find companies highly reluctant to let you go.

Is this an exhaustive list? Hardly. Is this list guaranteed to keep you employed forever? Nope. But this seems to be working for a lot of the people I run into at conferences and client consulting gigs, so I humbly submit it for your consideration.

But in no way do I consider this conversation completely over, either--feel free to post your own suggestions, or tell me why I'm full of crap on any (or all) of these.

This comment deserves response:

First of all, if you're quoting my post, blocking out my name, and attacking me behind my back by calling me "our intrepid troll", you could have shown the decency of linking back to my original post. Here it is, for those interested in the real discussion:

http://www.agilesoftwaredevelopment.com/blog/jurgenappelo/professionalism-knowledge-first

Well, frankly, I didn't get your post from your blog, I got it from an email 'zine (as indicated by the comment "This crossed my Inbox..."), and I didn't really think that anybody would have any difficulty tracking down where it came from, at least in terms of the email blast that put it into my Inbox. Coupled with the fact that, quite honestly, I don't generally make a practice of using peoples' names without their permission (and my email to the author asking if I could quote the post with his name attached generated no response), so I blocked out the name. Having said that, I'm pleased to offer full credit as to its source.

Now, let's review some of your remarks:

"COBOL is (at least) twenty years old, so therefore any use of COBOL must clearly be as idiotic."

I never talked about COBOL, or any other programming language. I was talking about old practices that are nowadays considered harmful and seriously damaging. (Like practising waterfall project management, instead of agile project management.) I don't see how programming in COBOL could seriously damage a business. Why do you compare COBOL with lobotomies? I don't understand. I couldn't care less about programming languages. I care about management practices.

Frankly, the distinction isn't very clear in your post, and even more frankly, to draw a distinction here is a bit specious. "I didn't mean we should throw away the good stuff that's twenty years old, only the bad stuff!" doesn't seem much like a defense to me. There are cases where waterfall style development is exactly the right thing to do a more agile approach is exactly the wrong thing to do--the difference, as I'm fond of saying, lies entirely in the context of the problem. Analogously, there are cases where keeping an existing COBOL system up and running is the wrong thing to do, and replacing it with a new system is the right thing to do. It all depends on context, and for that reason, any dogmatic suggestion otherwise is flawed.

"How can a developer honestly claim to know "what it can be good for", without some kind of experience to back it?"

I'm talking about gaining knowledge from the experience of others. If I hear 10 experts advising the same best practice, then I still don't have any experience in that best practice. I only have knowledge about it. That's how you can apply your knowledge without your experience.

Leaving aside the notion that there is no such thing as best practices (another favorite rant of mine), what you're suggesting is that you, the individual, don't necessarily have to have experience in the topic but others have to, before we can put faith into it. That's a very different scenario than saying "We don't need no stinkin' experience", and is still vastly more dangerous than saying, "I have used this, it works." I (and lots of IT shops, I've found) will vastly prefer the latter to the former.

"Knowledge, apparently, isn't enough--experience still matters"

Yes, I never said experience doesn't matter. I only said it has no value when you don't have gained the appropriate knowledge (from other sources) on when to apply it, and when not.

You said it when you offered up the title, "Knowledge, not Experience".

"buried under all the ludicrous hyperbole, he has a point"

Thanks for agreeing with me.

You're welcome! Seriously, I think I understand better what you were trying to say, and it's not the horrendously dangerous comments that I thought you were saying, so I will apologize here and now for believing you to be a wet-behind-the-ears/lets-let-technology-solve-all-our-problems/dangerous-to-the-extreme developer that I've run across far too often, particularly in startups. So, please, will you accept my apology?

"developers, like medical professionals, must ensure they are on top of their game and spend some time investing in themselves and their knowledge portfolio"

Exactly.

Exactly.

"this doesn't mean that everything you learn is immediately applicable, or even appropriate, to the situation at hand"

I never said that. You're putting words into my mouth.

My only claim is that you need to KNOW both new and old practices and understand which ones are good and which ones can be seriously damaging. I simply don't trust people who are bragging about their experience. What if a manager tells me he's got 15 years of experience managing developers? If he's a micro-manager I still don't want him. Because micro-management is considered harmful these days. A manager should KNOW that.

Again, this was precisely the read I picked up out of the post, and my apologies for the misinterpretation. But I stand by the idea that this is one of those posts that could be read in a highly dangerous fashion, and used to promote evil, in the form of "Well, he runs a company, so therefore he must know what he's doing, and therefore having any kind of experience isn't really necessary to use something new, so... see, Mr. CEO boss-of-mine? We're safe! Now get out of my way and let me use Software Factories to build our next-generation mission-critical core-of-the-company software system, even though nobody's ever done it before."

To speak to your example for a second, for example: Frankly, there are situations where a micro-manager is a good thing. Young, inexperienced developers, for example, need more hand-holding and mentoring than older, more senior, more experienced developers do (speaking stereotypically, of course). And, quite honestly, the guy with 15 years managing developers is far more likely to know how to manage developers than the guy who's never managed developers before at all. The former is the safer bet; not a guarantee, certainly, but often the safer bet, and that's sometimes the best we can do in this industry.

"And we definitely shouldn't look at anything older than five years ago and equate it to lobotomies."

I never said that either. Why do you claim that I said this? I don't have a problem with old techniques. The daily standup meeting is a 80-year old best practice. It was already used by pilots in the second world war. How could I be against that? It's fine as it is.

Um... because you used the term "lobotomies" first? And because your title pretty clearly implies the statement, perhaps? (And let's lose the term "best practice" entirely, please? There is no such thing--not even the daily standup.)

It's ok you didn't like my article. Sure it's meant to be provocative, and food for thought. The article got twice as many positive votes than negative votes from DZone readers. So I guess I'm adding value. But by taking the discussion away from its original context (both physically and conceptually), and calling me names, you're not adding any value for anyone.

I took it in exactly the context it was given--a DZone email blast. I can't help it if it was taken out of context, because that's how it was handed to me. What's worse, I can see a development team citing this as an "expert opinion" to their management as a justification to try untested approaches or technologies, or as inspiration to a young developer, who reads "knowledge, not experience", and thinks, "Wow, if I know all the cutting-edge latest stuff, I don't need to have those 10 years of experience to get that job as a senior application architect." If your article was aimed more clearly at the development process side of things, then I would wish it had appeared more clearly in the arena of development processes, and made it more clear that your aim was to suggest that managers (who aren't real big on reading blogs anyway, I've sadly found) should be a bit more pragmatic and open-minded about who they hire.

Look, I understand the desire for a provocative title--for me, the author of "The Vietnam of Computer Science", to cast stones at another author for choosing an eye-catching title is so far beyond hypocrisy as to move into sheer wild-eyed audacity. But I have seen, first-hand, how that article has been used to justify the most incredibly asinine technology decisions, and it moves me now to say "Be careful what you wish for" when choosing titles that meant to be provocative and food for thought. Sure, your piece got more positive votes than negative ones. So too, in their day, did articles on client-server, on CORBA, on Six-Sigma, on the necessity for big up-front design....

Let me put it to you this way. Assume your child or your wife is sick, and as you reach the hospital, the admittance nurse offers you a choice of the two doctors on call. Who do you want more: the doctor who just graduated fresh from medical school and knows all the latest in holistic and unconventional medicine, or the doctor with 30 years' experience and a solid track record of healthy patients?

Recently this little gem crossed my Inbox....

Professionalism = Knowledge First, Experience Last
By J----- A-----

Do you trust a doctor with diagnosing your mental problems if the doctor tells you he's got 20 years of experience? Do you still trust that doctor when he picks up his tools, and asks you to prepare for a lobotomy?

Would you still be impressed if the doctor had 20 years of experience in carrying out lobotomies?

I am always skeptic when people tell me they have X years of experience in a certain field or discipline, like "5 years of experience as a .NET developer", "8 years of experience as a project manager" or "12 years of experience as a development manager". It is as if people's professional levels need to be measured in years of practice.

This, of course, is nonsense.

Professionalism is measured by what you are going to do now...

Are you going to use some discredited technique from half a century ago?
•    Are you, as a .NET developer, going to use Response.Write, because you've got 5 years of experience doing exactly that?
•    Are you, as a project manager, going to create Gantt charts, because that's what you've been doing for 8 years?
•    Are you, as a development manager, going to micro-manage your team members, as you did in the 12 years before now?

If so, allow me to illustrate the value of your experience...

(Photo of "Zero" signs)

Here's an example of what it means to be a professional:

There's a concept called Kanban making headlines these days in some parts of the agile community. I honestly and proudly admit that I have no experience at all in applying Kanban. But that's just a minor inconvenience. Because I have attained the knowledge of what it is and what it can be good for. And now there are some planning issues in our organization for which this Kanban-stuff might be the perfect solution. I'm sure we're going to give it a shot, in a controlled setting, with time allocated for a pilot and proper evaluations afterwards. That's the way a professional tries to solve a problem.

Professionals don't match problems with their experiences. They match them with their knowledge.

Sure, experience is useful. But only when you already have the knowledge in place. Experience has no value when there's no knowledge to verify that you are applying the right experience.

Knowledge Comes First, Experience Comes Last

This is my message to anyone who wants to be a professional software developer, a professional project manager, or a professional development manager.

You must gain and apply knowledge first, and experience will help you after that. Professionals need to know about the latest developments and techniques.

They certainly don't bother measuring years of experience.

Are you still practicing lobotomies?

Um....

Wow.

Let's start with the logical fallacy in the first section. Do I trust a doctor with diagnosing my mental problems if he tells me he's got 20 years of experience? Generally, yes, unless I have reasons to doubt this. If the guy picks up a skull-drill and starts looking for a place to start boring into my skull, sure, I'll start to question his judgement.... But what does this have to do with anything? I wouldn't trust the guy if he picked up a chainsaw and started firing it up, either.

Look, I get the analogy: "Doctor has 20 years of experience using outdated skills", har har. Very funny, very memorable, and totally inappropriate metaphor for the situation. To stand here and suggest that developers who aren't using the latest-and-greatest, so-bleeding-edge-even-saying-the-name-cuts-your-skin tools or languages or technologies are somehow practicing lobotomies (which, by the way, are still a recommended practice in certain mental disorder cases, I understand) in order to solve any and all mental-health issues, is a gross mischaracterization--and the worst form of negligence--I've ever heard suggested.

And it comes as no surprise that it's coming from the CIO of a consulting company. (Note to self: here's one more company I don't want anywhere near my clients' IT infrastructure.)

Let's take this analogy to its logical next step, shall we?

COBOL is (at least) twenty years old, so therefore any use of COBOL must clearly be as idiotic as drilling holes in your skull to let the demons out. So any company currently using COBOL has no real option other than to immediately upgrade all of their currently-running COBOL infrastructure (despite the fact that it's tested, works, and cashes most of the US banking industry's checks on a daily basis) with something vastly superior and totally untested (since we don't need experience, just knowlege), like... oh, I dunno.... how about Ruby? Oh, no, wait, that's at least 10 years old. Ditto for Java. And let's not even think about C, Perl, Python....

I know; let's rewrite the entire financial industry's core backbone in Groovy, since it's only, what, 6 years old at this point? I mean, sure, we'll have to do all this over again in just four years, since that's when Groovy will turn 10 and thus obviously begin it's long slide into mediocrity, alongside the "four humors" of medicine and Aristotle's (completely inaccurate) anatomical depictions, but hey, that's progress, right? Forget experience, it has no value compared to the "knowledge" that comes from reading the documentation on a brand-new language, tool, library, or platform....

What I find most appalling is this part right here:

I honestly and proudly admit that I have no experience at all in applying Kanban. But that's just a minor inconvenience. Because I have attained the knowledge of what it is and what it can be good for.

How can a developer honestly claim to know "what it can be good for", without some kind of experience to back it? (Hell, I'll even accept that you have familiarity and experience with something vaguely relating to the thing at hand, if you've got it--after all, experience in Java makes you a pretty damn good C# developer, in my mind, and vice versa.)

And, to make things even more interesting, our intrepid troll, having established the attention-gathering headline, then proceeds to step away from the chasm, by backing away from this "knowledge-not-experience" position in the same paragraph, just one sentence later:

I'm sure we're going to give it a shot, in a controlled setting, with time allocated for a pilot and proper evaluations afterwards.

Ah... In other words, he and his company are going to experiment with this new technique, "in a controlled setting, with time allocated for a pilot and proper evaluations afterwards", in order to gain experience with the technique and see how it works and how it doesn't.

In other words....

.... experience matters.

Knowledge, apparently, isn't enough--experience still matters, and it matters a lot earlier than his "knowledge first, experience last" mantra seems to imply. Otherwise, once you "know" something, why not apply it immediately to your mission-critical core?

At the end of the day, buried under all the ludicrous hyperbole, he has a point: developers, like medical professionals, must ensure they are on top of their game and spend some time investing in themselves and their knowledge portfolio. Jay Zimmerman takes great pains to point this out at every No Fluff Just Stuff show, and he's right: those who spend the time to invest in their own knowledge portfolio, find themselves the last to be fired and the first to be hired. But this doesn't mean that everything you learn is immediately applicable, or even appropriate, to the situation at hand. Just because you learned Groovy last weekend in Austin doesn't mean you have the right--or the responsibility--to immediately start slipping Groovy in to the production servers. Groovy has its share of good things, yes, but it's got its share of negative consequences, too, and you'd better damn well know what they are before you start betting the company's future on it. (No, I will not tell you what those negative consequences are--that's your job, because what if it turns out I'm wrong, or they don't apply to your particular situation?) Every technology, language, library or tool has a positive/negative profile to it, and if you can't point out the pros as well as the cons, then you don't understand the technology and you have no business using it on anything except maybe a prototype that never leaves your local hard disk. Too many projects were built with "flavor-of-the-year" tools and technologies, and a few years later, long after the original "bleeding-edge" developer has gone on to do a new project with a new "bleeding-edge" technology, the IT guys left to admin and upkeep the project are struggling to find ways to keep this thing afloat.

If you're languishing at a company that seems to resist anything and everything new, try this exercise on: go down to the IT guys, and ask them why they resist. Ask them to show you a data flow diagram of how information feeds from one system to another (assuming they even have one). Ask them how many different operating systems they have, how many different languages were used to create the various software programs currently running, what tools they have to know when one of those programs fails, and how many different data formats are currently in use. Then go find the guys currently maintaining and updating and bug-fixing those current programs, and ask to see the code. Figure out how long it would take you to rewrite the whole thing, and keep the company in business while you're at it.

There is a reason "legacy code" exists, and while we shouldn't be afraid to replace it, we shouldn't be cavalier about tossing it out, either.

And we definitely shouldn't look at anything older than five years ago and equate it to lobotomies. COBOL had some good ideas that still echo through the industry today, and Groovy and Scala and Ruby and F# undoubtedly have some buried mines that we will, with benefit of ten years' hindsight, look back at in 2018 and say, "Wow, how dumb were we to think that this was the last language we'd ever have to use!".

That's experience talking.

And the funny thing is, it seems to have served us pretty well. When we don't listen to the guys claiming to know how to use something effectively that they've never actually used before, of course.

Caveat emptor.

If you've peeked at my blog site in the last twenty minutes or so, you've probably noticed some churn in the template in the upper-left corner; by now, it's been finalized, and it reads "JOB REFERRALS".

WTHeck? Has Ted finally sold out? Sort of, not really. At least, I don't think so.

Here's the deal: the company behind those ads, Entice Labs, contacted me to see if I was interested in hosting some job ads on my blog, given that I seem to generate a moderate amount of traffic. I figured it was worthwhile to at least talk to them, and the more I did, the more I liked what I heard--the ads are focused specifically at developers of particular types (I chose a criteria string of "Software Developers", subcategorized by "Java, .NET, .NET (Visual Basic), .NET (C#), C++, Flex, Ruby on Rails, C, SQL, JavaScript, HTML" though I'm not sure whether "HTML" will bring in too many web-designer jobs), and visitors to my blog don't have to click through the ads to get to the content, which was important to me. And, besides, given the current economic climate, if I can help somebody find a new job, I'd like to.

Now for the full disclaimer: I will be getting money back from these job ads, though how much, to be honest with you, I'm not sure. I'm really not doing this for the money, so I make this statement now: I will take 50% of whatever I make through this program and donate it to a charitable organization. The other 50% I will use to offset travel and expenses to user groups and/or CodeCamps and/or for-free conferences put on throughout the country. (Email me if you know of one that you're organizing or attending and would like to see me speak at, and I'll tell you if there's any room in the budget left for it. )

Anyway, I figured if the ads got too obnoxious, I could always remove them; it's an experiment of sorts. Tell me what you think.

The Pragmatic Programmer says, "Learn a new language every year". This is great advice, not just because it puts new tools into your mental toolbox that you can pull out on various occasions to get a job done, but also because it opens your mind to new ideas and new concepts that will filter their way into your code even without explicit language support. For example, suppose you've looked at (J/Iron)Ruby or Groovy, and come to like the "internal iterator" approach as a way of simplifying moving across a collection of objects in a uniform way; for political and cultural reasons, though, you can't write code in anything but Java. You're frustrated, because local anonymous functions (also commonly--and, I think, mistakenly--called closures) are not a first-class concept in Java. Then, you later look at Haskell/ML/Scala/F#, which makes heavy use of what Java programmers would call "static methods" to carry out operations, and realize that this could, in fact, be adapted to Java to give you the "internal iteration" concept over the Java Collections:

   1: package com.tedneward.util;

   2:  

   3: import java.util.*;

   4:  

   5: public interface Acceptor

   6: {

   7:   public void each(Object obj);

   8: }

   9:  

  10: public class Collection

  11: {

  12:   public static void each(List list, Acceptor acc)

  13:   {

  14:     for (Object o : list)

  15:       acc.each(o);

  16:   }

  17: }

Where using it would look like this:

   1: import com.tedneward.util.*;

   2:  

   3: List personList = ...;

   4: Collection.each(new Accpetor() {

   5:   public void each(Object person) {

   6:     System.out.println("Found person " + person + ", isn't that nice?");

   7:   }

   8: });

Is it quite as nice or as clean as using it from a language that has first-class support for anonymous local functions? No, but slowly migrating over to this style has a couple of definitive effects, most notably that you will start grooming the rest of your team (who may be reluctant to pick up these new languages) towards the new ideas that will be present in Groovy, and when they finally do see them (as they will, eventually, unless they hide under rocks on a daily basis), they will realize what's going on here that much more quickly, and start adding their voices to the call to start using (J/Iron)Ruby/Groovy for certain things in the codebase you support.

(By the way, this is so much easier to do in C# 2.0, thanks to generics, static classes and anonymous delegates...

   1: namespace TedNeward.Util

   2: {

   3:   public delegate void EachProc<T>(T obj);

   4:   public static class Collection

   5:   {

   6:     public static void each(ArrayList list, EachProc proc)

   7:     {

   8:       foreach (Object o in list)

   9:         proc(o);

  10:     }

  11:   }

  12: }

  13:  

  14: // ...

  15:  

  16: ArrayList personList = ...;

  17: Collection.each(list, delegate(Object person) {

  18:   System.Console.WriteLine("Found " + person + ", isn't that nice?");

  19: });

... though the collection classes in the .NET FCL are nowhere near as nicely designed as those in the Java Collections library, IMHO. C# programmers take note: spend at least a week studying the Java Collections API.)

This, then, opens the much harder question of, "Which language?" Without trying to infer any sort of order or importance, here's a list of languages to consider, with URLs where applicable; I invite your own suggestions, by the way, as I'm sure there's a lot of languages I don't know about, and quite frankly, would love to. The "current hotness" is to learn the languages marked in bold, so if you want to be daring and different, try one of those that isn't. (I've provided some links, but honestly it's kind of tiring to put all of them in; just remember that Google is your friend, and you should be OK. )

• Visual Basic. Yes, as in Visual Basic--if you haven't played with dynamic languages before, try turning "Option Strict Off", write some code, and see how interacting with the .NET FCL suddenly changes into a duck-typed scenario. If you're really curious, have a look at the generated code in Reflector or ILDasm, and notice how the generated code looks a lot like the generated JVM code from other dynamic languages on an execution environment, a la Groovy.
• Ruby (JRuby, IronRuby):
• Groovy: Some call this "javac 2.0"; I'm not sure it merits that title, or the assumption of the mantle of "King of the JVM" that would seem to go with that title, but the fact is, Groovy's a useful language.
• Scala: A "SCAlable LAnguage" for the JVM (and CLR, though that feature has been left to the community to support), incorporating both object-oriented and functional concepts, plus a few new ideas, into a single package. I'm obviously bullish on Scala, given the talks and articles I've done on it.
• F#: Originally OCaml-on-the-CLR, now F# is starting to take on a personality of its own as Microsoft productizes it. Like Scala and Erlang, F# will be immediately applicable in concurrency scenarios, I think. I'm obviously bullish on F#, given the talks, articles, and book I'm doing on it.
• Erlang: Functional language with a strong emphasis on parallel processing, scalability, and concurrency.
• Perl: People will perhaps be surprised I say this, given my public dislike of Perl's syntax, but I think every programmer should learn Perl, and decide for themselves what's right and what's wrong about Perl. Besides, there's clearly no argument that Perl is one of the power tools in every *nix sysadmin's toolbox.
• Python: Again, given my dislike of Python's significant whitespace, my suggestion to learn it here may surprise some, but Python seems to be stepping into Perl's shoes as the sysadmin language tool of choice, and frankly, lots of people like the significant whitespace, since that's how they format their code anyway.
• C++: The grandaddy of them all, in some ways; if you've never looked at C++ before, you should, particularly what they're doing with templates in the Boost library. As Scott Meyers once put it, "We're a long way from Stack<T>!"
• D: Walter Bright's native-compiling garbage-collected successor to C++/Java/C#.
• Objective-C (part of gcc): Great "other" object-oriented C-based language that never gathered the kind of attention C++ did, yet ended up making its mark on the industry thanks to Steve Jobs' love of the language and its incorporation into the NeXT (and later, Mac OS X) toolchain. Obj-C is a message-passing object language, which has some interesting implications in its own right.
• Common Lisp (Steel Bank Common Lisp): What happens when you create a language that holds as a core principle that the language should hold no clear delineation between "code" and "data"? Or that the syntactic expression of the language should be accessible from within that langauge? You get Lisp, and if you're not sure what I'm talking about, pick up a Lisp or a Scheme implementation and start experimenting.
• Scheme (PLT Scheme, SISC): Scheme is one of the earliest dialects of Lisp, and much of the same syntactic flexibility and power of Lisp is in Scheme, as well. While the syntaxes are usually not directly interchangeable, they're close enough that learning one is usually enough.
• Clojure: Rich Hickey (who also built "dotLisp" for the CLR) has done an amazing job of bringing Lisp to the JVM, including a few new ideas, such as some functional concepts and an implementation of software transactional memory, among other things.
• ECMAScript (E4X, Rhino, ES4): If you've never looking at JavaScript outside of the browser, you're in for a surprise--as Glenn Vanderburg put it during one of his NFJS talks, "There's a real programming language in there!". I'm particularly fond of E4X, which integrates XML as a native primitive type, and the Rhino implementation fully supports it, which makes it attractive to use as an XML services implementation language.
• Haskell (Jaskell): One of the original functional languages. Learning this will give a programmer a leg up on the functional concepts that are creeping into other environments. Jaskell is an implementation of Haskell on the JVM, and they've taken the concept of functional further, creating a build system ("Neptune") on top of Jaskell + Ant, to yield a syntax that's... well... more Haskellian... for building Java projects. (Whether it's better/cleaner than Ant is debatable, but it certainly makes clear the functional nature of build scripts.)
• ML: Another of the original functional languages. Probably don't need to learn this if you learn Haskell, but hey, it can't hurt.
• Heron: Heron is interesting because it looks to take on more of the modeling aspects of programming directly into the language, such as state transitions, which is definitely a novel idea. I'm eagerly looking forward to future drops. (I'm not so interested in the graphical design mode, or the idea of "executable UML", but I think there's a vein of interesting ideas here that could be mined for other languages that aren't quite so lofty in scope.)
• HaXe: A functional language that compiles to three different target platforms: its own (Neko), Flash, and/or Javascript (for use in Web DOMs).
• CAL: A JVM-based statically-typed language from the folks who bring you Crystal Reports.
• E: An interesting tack on distributed systems and security. Not sure if it's production-ready, but it's definitely an eye-opener to look at.
• Prolog: A language built around the idea of logic and logical inference. Would love to see this in play as a "rules engine" in a production system.
• Nemerle: A CLR-based language with functional syntax and semantics, and semantic macros, similar to what we see in Lisp/Scheme.
• Nice: A JVM-based language that permits multi-dispatch methods, sometimes known as multimethods.
• OCaml: An object-functional fusion that was the immediate predecessor of F#. The HaXe and MTASC compilers are both built in OCaml, and frankly, it's in a startlingly small number of lines of code, highlighting how appropriate functional languages are for building compilers and interpreters.
• Smalltalk (Squeak, VisualWorks, Strongtalk): Smalltalk was widely-known as "the O-O language that all the C guys turned to in order to learn how to build object-oriented programs", but very few people at the time understood that Smalltalk was wildly different because of its message-passing and loosely/un-typed semantics. Now we know better (I hope). Have a look.
• TCL (Jacl): Tool Command Language, a procedural scripting language that has some nice embedding capabilities. I'd be curious to try putting a TCL-based language in the hands of end users to see if it was a good DSL base. The Jacl implementation is built on top of the JVM.
• Forth: The original (near as I can tell) stack-based language, in which all execution happens on an execution stack, not unlike what we see in the JVM or CLR. Given how much Lisp has made out of the "atoms and lists" concept, I'm curious if Forth's stack-based approach yields a similar payoff.
• Lua: Dynamically-typed language that lives to be embedded; known for its biggest embedder's popularity: World of Warcraft, along with several other games/game engines. A great demonstration of the power of embedding a language into an engine/environment to allow users to create emergent behavior.
• Fan: Another language that seeks to incorporate both static and dynamic typing, running on top of both the JVM or the CLR.
• Factor: I'm curious about Factor because it's another stack-based language, with a lot of inspiration from some of the other languages on this list.
• Boo: A Python-inspired CLR language that Ayende likes for domain-specific languages.
• Cobra: A Python-inspired language that seeks to encompass both static and dynamic typing into one language. Fascinating stuff.
• Slate: A "prototype-based object-oriented programming language based on Self, CLOS, and Smalltalk-80." Apparently on hold due to loss of interest from the founder, last release was 0.3.5 in August of 2005.
• Joy: Factor's primary inspiration, another stack-based language.
• Raven: A scripting language that "rips off" from Python, Forth, Perl, and the creator's own head.
• Onyx: "Onyx is a powerful stack-based, multi-threaded, interpreted, general purpose programming language similar to PostScript. It can be embedded as an extension language similarly to ficl (Forth), guile (scheme), librep (lisp dialect), s-lang, Lua, and Tcl."
• LOLCode: No, you won't use LOLcode on a project any time soon, but LOLCode has had so many different implementations of it built, it's a great practice tool towards building your own languages, a la DSLs. LOLcode has all the basic components a language would use, so if you can build a parser, AST and execution engine (either interpreter or compiler) for LOLcode, then you've got the basic skills in place to build an external DSL.

There's more, of course, but hopefully there's something in this list to keep you busy for a while. Remember to send me your favorite new-language links, and I'll add them to the list as seems appropriate.

Happy hacking!

As Amanda notes, I'm riding with 46 other folks (and lots of beer) on a bus from Michigan to devLink in Tennessee, as part of sponsoring the show. (I think she got my language preferences just a teensy bit mixed up, though.)

Which brings up a related point, actually: Amanda (of "the great F# T-shirt" fame from TechEd this year) and I are teaming up to do F# In A Nutshell for O'Reilly. The goal is to have a Rough Cut ready (just the language parts) by the time F# goes CTP this summer or fall, so we're on an accelerated schedule. If you don't see much from me via the blog for a while, now you know why. Once that's done, I'm going dark on a Scala book to follow--details to follow when that contract is nailed down.

Meanwhile.... As she suggests, the bus will likely be filled with lots of lively debate. The nice thing about having a technical debate with drunk geeks on a bus traveling down the highway at speed is that it's actually pretty easy to win the debate, if you really want to:

"You are such an idiot! Object-relashunal mappers are just... *burp* so cool! Why can't you see that?"

"Idiot, am I? I demand satisfaction! Step outside, sir!"

"Fine, you--" WHOOSH ... THUMP-THUMP....

"Next?"

I'm looking forward to this.

Editor's note: (Contact Amanda if you're interested in participating on the devLink bus, not the book. Thanks for the interest, but we aren't soliciting co-authors. We think we have this one pretty well covered, but we're always interested in reviewers--for that, you can contact either of us.)

I've been asked to put together a list of the "best" Java resources that every up-and-coming Java developer should have, and I'd like this list to be as comprehensive as possible and, more importantly, reflect more than just my own opinion. So, either through comments or through email, let me know what you think the best Java resources are in the following categories:

• Websites and developer Web portals
• Weblogs/RSS feeds. (Not all have to be hand-authored blogs--if you find an RSS feed for news on java.net projects, for example, that would count as well.)
• Java packages and/or libaries. (Either those within Java Standard Edition--a la Reflection or the Scripting API--or from Enterprise Edition--a la JMS--or even third-party packages, a la Spring.)
• Conferences, even including those that I don't speak at.
• Books.
• Tools. (IDEs, build tools, static analysis tools, either commercial or open source.)
• Future trends you think bear watching.

There is, of course, no prize to be won here, and I'd please ask the vendors (commercial or open source) who watch my blog to avoid outright advertisements in comments (though you are free to rattle off the various advantages of your product in an email to me), in order to avoid turning this weblog into a gigantic row of billboards along the freeway. I am interested in peoples' opinions, however, and more importantly, why you think X should be on that list, or even why Y shouldn't. Keep it civil, though, please--I'll delete any comments that get too vindictive or offensive. (That doesn't mean that you have to agree with me--just avoid calling anybody names. Basic 'Netiquette.)

Oh, and if you want to be mentioned in the article (which will be published on an international developer site), please indicate how you'd like to be accredited. Or not. Whatever you prefer.

Steve Yegge posted the transcript from a talk on dynamic languages that he gave at Stanford.

Cedric Beust posted a response to Steve's talk, espousing statically-typed languages.

Numerous comments and flamewars erupted, not to mention a Star Wars analogy (which always makes things more fun).

This is my feeble attempt to play galactic peacemaker. Or at least galactic color commentary and play-by-play. I have no doubts about its efficacy, and that it will only fan the flames, for that's how these things work. Still, I feel a certain perverse pleasure in pretending, so....

Enjoy the carnage that results.

First of all, let me be very honest: I like Steve's talk. I think he does a pretty good job of representing the negatives and positives of dynamic languages, though there are obviously places where I'm going to disagree:

• "Because we all know that C++ has some very serious problems, that organizations, you know, put hundreds of staff years into fixing. Portability across compiler upgrades, across platforms, I mean the list goes on and on and on. C++ is like an evolutionary sort of dead-end. But, you know, it's fast, right?" Funny, I doubt Bjarne Stroustrup or Herb Sutter would agree with the "evolutionary dead-end" statement, but they're biased, so let's put that aside for a moment. Have organizations put hundreds of staff years into fixing the problems of C++? Possibly--it would be good to know what Steve considers the "very serious problems" of C++, because that list he does give (compiler/platform/language upgrades and portability across platforms) seems problematic regardless of the langauge or platform you choose--Lord knows we saw that with Java, and Lord knows we see it with ECMAScript in the browser, too. The larger question should be, can, and does, the language evolve? Clearly, based on the work in the Boost libraries and the C++0X standards work, the answer is yes, every bit as much as Java or C#/.NET is, and arguably much more so than what we're seeing in some of the dynamic languages. C++ is getting a standardized memory model, which will make a portable threading package possible, as well as lambda expressions, which is a far cry from the language that I grew up with. That seems evolutionary to me. What's more, Bjarne has said, point-blank, that he prefers taking a slow approach to adopting new features or ideas, so that it can be "done right", and I think that's every bit a fair position to take, regardless of whether I agree with it or not. (I'd probably wish for a faster adoption curve, but that's me.) Oh, and if you're thinking that C++'s problems stem from its memory management approach, you've never written C++ with a garbage collector library.
• "And so you ask them, why not use, like, D? Or Objective-C. And they say, "well, what if there's a garbage collection pause?" " Ah, yes, the "we fear garbage collection" argument. I would hope that Java and C#/.NET have put that particular debate to rest by now, but in the event that said dragon's not yet slain, let's do so now: GC does soak up some cycles, but for the most part, for most applications, the cost is lost in the noise of everything else. As with all things performance related, however, profile.
• "And so, you know, their whole argument is based on these fallacious, you know, sort of almost pseudo-religious... and often it's the case that they're actually based on things that used to be true, but they're not really true anymore, and we're gonna get to some of the interesting ones here." Steve, almost all of these discussions are pseudo-religious in nature. For some reason, programmers like to identify themselves in terms of the language they use, and that just sets up the religious nature of the debate from the get-go.
• "You know how there's Moore's Law, and there are all these conjectures in our industry that involve, you know, how things work. And one of them is that languages get replaced every ten years. ... Because that's what was happening up until like 1995. But the barriers to adoption are really high." I can't tell from the transcript of Steve's talk if this is his opinion, or that this is a conjecture/belief of the industry; in either case, I thoroughly disagree with this sentiment--the barriers to entry to create your own language have never been lower than today, and various elements of research work and available projects just keep making it easier and easier to do, particularly if you target one of the available execution engines. Now, granted, if you want your language to look different from the other languages out there, or if you want to do some seriously cool stuff, yes, there's a fair amount of work you still have to do... but that's always going to be the case. As we find ways to make it easier to build what's "cool" today, the definition of what's "cool" rises in result. (Nowhere is this more clear than in the game industry, for example.) Moore's Law begets Ballmer's Corollary: User expectations double every eighteen months, requiring us to use up all that power trying to meet those expectations with fancier ways of doing things.
• It's a section that's too long to quote directly here, but Steve goes on to talk about how programmers aren't using these alternative languages, and that if you even suggest trying to use D or Scala or [fill in the blank], you're going to get "lynched for trying to use a language that the other engineers don't know. ... And [my intern] is, like, "well I understand the argument" and I'm like "No, no, no! You've never been in a company where there's an engineer with a Computer Science degree and ten years of experience, an architect, who's in your face screaming at you, with spittle flying on you, because you suggested using, you know... D. Or Haskell. Or Lisp, or Erlang, or take your pick." " Steve, with all due respect to your experience, I know plenty of engineers and companies who are using some of these "alternative" languages, and they're having some good success. But frankly, if you work in a company where an architect is "in your face screaming at you, with spittle flying on you", frankly, it's time to move on, because that company is never going to try anything new. Period. I don't care if we're talking about languages, Spring, agile approaches, or trying a new place for lunch today. Companies get into a rut just as much as individuals do, and if the company doesn't challenge that rut every so often, they're going to get bypassed. Period, end of story. That doesn't mean trying every new thing under the sun on your next "mission-critical" project, but for God's sake, Mr. CTO, do you really want to wait until your competition has bypassed you before adopting something new? There's a lot of project work that goes on that has room for some experimentation and experience-gathering before utilizing something on the next big project.
• "I made the famously, horribly, career-shatteringly bad mistake of trying to use Ruby at Google, for this project. ... And I became, very quickly, I mean almost overnight, the Most Hated Person At Google. And, uh, and I'd have arguments with people about it, and they'd be like Nooooooo, WHAT IF... And ultimately, you know, ultimately they actually convinced me that they were right, in the sense that there actually were a few things. There were some taxes that I was imposing on the systems people, where they were gonna have to have some maintenance issues that they wouldn't have [otherwise had]. Those reasons I thought were good ones." Recognizing the cost of deploying a new platform into the IT sphere is a huge deal that programmers frequently try to ignore in their zeal to adopt something new, and as a result, IT departments frequently swing the other way, resisting all change until it becomes inevitable. This is where running on top of one of the existing execution environments (the JVM or the CLR in particular) becomes so powerful--the actual deployment platform doesn't change, and the IT guys remain more or less disconnected from the whole scenario. This is the principal advantage JRuby and IronPython and Jython and IronRuby will have over their native-interpreted counterparts. As for maintenance issues, aside from the "somebody's gonna have to learn this language" tax (which is a real tax but far less costly, I believe, than most people think it to be), I'm not sure what issues would crop up--the IT guys don't usually change your Java or C# or Visual Basic code in production, do they?
• Steve then gets into the discussion about tools around dynamic languages, and I heartily agree with him: the tool vendors have a much deeper toolchest than we (non-tool vendor programmers) give them credit for, and they're proving it left and right as IDEs get better and better for dynamic languages like Groovy and Ruby. In some areas, though, I think we as developers lean too strongly against our tools, expecting them to be able to do the thinking for us, and getting all grumpy when they can't or don't. Granted, I don't want to give up my IntelliJ any time soon, but let's think about this for a second: if I can't program Java today without IntelliJ, then is that my fault, the language's fault, the industry's fault, or some combination thereof? Or is it maybe just a fact of progress? (Would anybody consider building assembly language in Notepad today? Does that make assembly language wrong? Or just the wrong tool for the job?)
• Steve's point about how Java IDE's miss the Reflective case is a good one, and one that every Java programmer should consider. How much of your Java (or C# or C++) code actually isn't capturable directly in the IDE?
• Steve then goes into the ubiquitous Java-generics rant, and I'll have to admit, he's got some good points here--why didn't we (Java, though this applies just as equally to C#) just let the runtime throw the exception when the cast fails, and otherwise just let things go? My guess is that there's probably some good rationale that presumes you already accept the necessity of more verbose syntax in exchange for knowing where the cast might potentially fail, even though there's plenty of other places in the language where exceptions can be thrown without that verbose syntax warning you of that fact, array indexers being a big one. One thing I will point out, however, in what I believe is a refutation of what Steve's suggesting in this discussion: from my research in the area and my memory about the subject from way back when, the javac compiler really doesn't do much in the way of optimizations, and hasn't tried since about JDK 1.1, for the precise reason he points out: the JITter's going to optimize all this stuff anyway, so it's easier to just relax and let the JITter do the heavy lifting.
• The discussion about optimizations is interesting, and while I think he glosses over some issues and hyper-focuses on others, two points stand out, in my mind: performance hits often come from places you don't expect, and that micro-benchmarks generally don't prove much of anything. Sometimes that hit will come from the language, and sometimes that hit will come from something entirely differently. Profile first. Don't let your intuition get in the way, because your intuition sucks. Mine does, too, by the way--there's just too many moving parts to be able to keep it all straight in your head.

Steve then launches into a series of Q&A with the audience, but we'll let the light dim on that stage, and turn our attention over to Cedric's response.

• "... the overall idea is that dynamically typed languages are on the rise and statically typed languages are on their way out." Actually, the transcript I read seemed to imply that Steve thought that dynamically typed languages are cool but that nobody will use them for a variety of reasons, some of which he agreed with. I thoroughly disagree with Steve's conclusion there, by the way, but so be it ...
• "I'm happy to be the Luke Skywalker to his Darth Vader. ... Evil shall not prevail." Yes, let's not let this debate fall into the pseudo-religious category, shall we? Fully religious debates have such a better track record of success, so let's just make it "good vs evil", in order to ensure emotions get all neatly wrapped throughout. Just remember, Cedric, even Satan can quote the Bible... and it was Jesus telling us that, so if you disagree with anything I say below you must be some kind of Al-Qaeda terrorist. Or something.
  • [Editor's note: Oh, shit, he did NOT just call Cedric a terrorist and a Satanist and invoke the name of Christ in all this. Time to roll out the disclaimer... "Ladies and gentlemen, the views and opinions expressed in this blog entry...."]
  • [Author's note: For the humor-challenged in the crowd, no I do not think Cedric is a terrorist. I like Cedric, and hopefully he still likes me, too. Of course, I have also been accused of being the Antichrist, so what that says about Cedric I'm not sure.]
• Cedric on Scala:
  • "Have you taken a look at implicits? Seriously? Just when I thought we were not just done realizing that global variables are bad, but we have actually come up with better ways to leverage the concept with DI frameworks such as Guice, Scala knocks the wind out of us with implicits and all our hardly earned knowledge about side effects is going down the drain again." Umm.... Cedric? One reaction comes to mind here, and it's best expressed as.... WTF?!? Implicits are not global variables or DI, they're more a way of doing conversions, a la autoboxing but more flexible. I agree that casual use of implicits can get you in trouble, but I'd have thought Scala's "there are no operators just methods with funny names" would be the more disconcerting of the two.
  • "As for pattern matching, it makes me feel as if all the careful data abstraction that I have built inside my objects in order to isolate them from the unforgiving world are, again, thrown out of the window because I am now forced to write deconstructors to expose all this state just so my classes can be put in a statement that doesn't even have the courtesy to dress up as something that doesn't smell like a switch/case..." I suppose if you looked at pattern-matching and saw nothing more than a switch/case, then I'd agree with you, but it turns out that pattern-matching is a lot more powerful than just being a switch/case. I think what Cedric's opposing is the fact that pattern-matching can actually bind to variables expressed in the individual match clauses, which might look like deconstructors exposing state... but that's not the way they get used, from what I've seen thus far. But, hey, just because the language offers it, people will use it wrongly, right? So God forbid a language's library should allow me to, say, execute private methods or access private fields....
• Cedric on the difficulty to impose a non-mainstream language in the industry: "Let me turn the table on you and imagine that one of your coworkers comes to you and tells you that he really wants to implement his part of the project in this awesome language called Draco. How would you react? Well, you're a pragmatic kind of guy and even though the idea seems wacky, I'm sure you would start by doing some homework (which would show you that Draco was an awesome language used back in the days on the Amiga). Reading up on Draco, you realize that it's indeed a very cool language that has some features that are a good match for the problem at hand. But even as you realize this, you already know what you need to tell that guy, right? Probably something like "You're out of your mind, go back to Eclipse and get cranking". And suddenly, you've become *that* guy. Just because you showed some common sense." If, I suppose, we equate "common sense" with "thinking the way Cedric does", sure, that makes sense. But you know, if it turned out that I was writing something that targeted the Amiga, and Draco did, in fact, give us a huge boost on the competition, and the drawbacks of using Draco seemed to pale next to the advantages of using it, then... Well, gawrsh, boss, it jus' might make sense to use 'dis har Draco thang, even tho it ain't Java. This is called risk mitigation, and frankly, it's something too few companies go through because they've "standardized" on a language and API set across the company that's hardly applicable to the problem at hand. Don't get me wrong--you don't want the opposite extreme, which is total anarchy in the operations center as people use any and all languages/platforms available to them on a willy-nilly basis, but the funny thing is, this is a continuum, not a binary switch. This is where languages-on-execution-engines (like the JVM or CLR) gets such a great win-win condition: IT can just think in terms of supporting the JVM or CLR, and developers can then think in whatever language they want, so long it compiles/runs on those platforms.
• Cedric on building tools for dynamic languages: "I still strongly disagree with that. It is different *and* harder (and in some cases, impossible). Your point regarding the fact that static refactoring doesn't cover 100% of the cases is well taken, but it's 1) darn close to 100% and 2) getting closer to it much faster than any dynamic tool ever could. By the way, Java refactorings correcting comments, XML and property files are getting pretty common these days, but good luck trying to perform a reliable method renaming in 100 Ruby files." I'm not going to weigh in here, since I don't write tools for either dynamic or static languages, but watching what the IntelliJ IDEA guys are doing with Groovy, and what the NetBeans guys are doing with Ruby, I'm more inclined to believe in what Steve thinks than what Cedric does. As for the "reliable method renaming in 100 Ruby files", I don't know this for a fact, but I'll be willing to be that we're a lot closer to that than Cedric thinks we are. (I'd love to hear comments from somebody neck-deep in the Ruby crowd who's done this and their experience doing so.)
• Cedric on generics: "I no longer bother trying to understand why complex Generic examples are so... well, darn complex. Yes, it's pretty darn hard to follow sometimes, but here are a few points for you to ponder:
  • 90% of the Java programmers (including myself) only ever use Generics for Collections.
  • These same programmers never go as far as nesting two Generic declarations.
  • For API developers and users alike, Generics are a huge progress.
  • Scala still requires you to understand covariance and contravariance (but with different rules. People seem to say that Scala's rules are simpler, I'm not so sure, but not interested in finding out for the aforementioned reasons)."
  Honestly, Cedric, the fact that 90% of the Java programmers are only using generics for collections doesn't sway me in the slightest. 90% of the world's population doesn't use Calculus, either, but that doesn't mean that it's not useful, or that we shouldn't be trying to improve our understanding of it and how to do useful things with it. After looking at what the C++ community has done with templates (the Boost libraries) and what .NET is doing with its generic system (LINQ and F# to cite two examples), I think Java missed a huge opportunity with generics. Type erasure may have made sense in a world where Java was the only practical language on top of the JVM, but in a world that's coming to accept Groovy and JRuby and Scala as potential equals on the JVM, it makes no sense whatsoever. Meanwhile, when thinking about Scala, let's take careful note that a Scala programmer can go a long way with the langauge before having to think about covariance, contravariance, upper and lower type bounds, simpler or not. (For what it's worth, I agree with you, I'm not sure if they're simpler, either.)
• Cedric on dynamic language performance: "What will keep preventing dynamically typed languages from displacing statically typed ones in large scale software is not performance, it's the simple fact that it's impossible to make sense of a giant ball of typeless source files, which causes automatic refactorings to be unreliable, hence hardly applicable, which in turn makes developers scared of refactoring. And it's all downhill from there. Hello bit rot." There's a certain circular logic here--if we presume that IDEs can't make sense of "typeless source files" (I wasn't aware that any source file was statically typed, honestly--this must be something Google teaches), then it follows that refactoring will be impossible or at least unreliable, and thus a giant ball of them will be unmanageable. I disagree with Cedric's premise--that IDEs can't make sense of dynamic language code--so therefore I disagree with the entire logical chain as a result. What I don't disagree with is the implicit presumption that the larger the dynamic language source base, the harder it is to keep straight in your head. In fact, I'll even amend that statement further: the larger the source base (dynamic or otherwise), the harder it is to keep straight in your head. Abstractions are key to the long-term success of any project, so the language I work with had best be able to help me create those abstractions, or I'm in trouble once I cross a certain threshold. That's true regardless of the language: C++, Java, C#, Ruby, or whatever. That's one of the reasons I'm spending time trying to get my head around Lisp and Scheme, because those languages were all about building abstractions upon abstractions upon abstractions, but in libraries, rather than in the language itself, so they could be swapped out and replaced with something else when the abstractions failed or needed evolution.
• Cedric on program unmaintainability: "I hate giving anecdotal evidence to support my points, but that won't stop me from telling a short story that happened to me just two weeks ago: I found myself in this very predicament when trying to improve a Ruby program that 1) I just wrote a few days before and 2) is 200 lines long. I was staring at an object, trying to remember what it does, failing, searching manually in emacs where it was declared, found it as a "Hash", and then realized I still had no idea what the darn thing is. You see my point..." Ain't nothing wrong with anecdotal evidence, Cedric. We all have it, and if we all examine it en masse, some interesting patterns can emerge. Funny thing is, I've had exactly the same experience with C++ code, Java code, and C# code. What does that tell you? It tells me that I probably should have cooked up some better abstractions for those particular snippets, and that's what I ended up doing. As a matter of fact, I just helped a buddy of mine untangle some Ruby code to turn it into C#, and despite the fact that he's never written (or read) a Ruby program in his life, we managed to flip it over to C# in a couple of hours, including the execution of Ruby code blocks (I love anonymous methods) stored in a string-keyed hash within an array. And this was Ruby code that neither of us had ever seen before, much less written it a few days prior.
• Cedric (and Steve) on error messages: "[Steve said] And the weird thing is, I realized early in my career that I would actually rather have a runtime error than a compile error. [Cedric responded] You probably already know this, but you drew the wrong conclusion. You didn't want a runtime error, you wanted a clear error. One that doesn't lie to you, like CFront (and a lot of C++ compilers even today, I hear) used to spit in our faces. And once I have a clear error message, I much prefer to have it as early as possible, thank you very much." Honestly, I agree with Cedric here: I would much prefer errors before execution, as early as possible, so that there's less chance of my users finding the errors I haven't found yet. And I agree that some of the error messages we sometimes get are pretty incomprehensible, particularly from the C++ compiler during template expansion. But how is that different from the ubiquitous Java "ClassCastException: Cannot cast Person to Person" that arises from time to time? Once you know what the message is telling you, it's easy to know how to fix it, but getting to the point of knowing what the error message is telling you requires a good working understanding of Java ClassLoaders. Do we really expect that any tool--static or dynamic, compiler or runtime, is going to be able to produce error messages that somehow precludes the need to have the necessary background to understand it? All errors are relative to the context from which they are born. If you lack that context, the error message, no matter how well-written or phrased, is useless.
• Cedric on "The dynamic nuclear winter": "[Steve said] And everybody else went and chased static. And they've been doing it like crazy. And they've, in my opinion, reached the theoretical bounds of what they can deliver, and it has FAILED. [Cedric responded] Quite honestly, words fail me here." Wow. Just... wow. I can't agree with Steve at all, that static(ically typed languages) has FAILED, or that they've reached the theoretical bounds of what they can deliver, but neither can I say with complete confidence that statically-typed languages are The Way Forward, either. I think, for the time, chasing statically-typed languages was the right thing to do, because for a long time we were in a position where programmer time was cheaper than computer time; now, I believe that this particular metric has flipped, and that it's time we started thinking about what the costs of programmer time really are. (Frankly, I'd love to see a double-blind study on this, but I've no idea how one would carry that out in a scientific manner.)

So.... what's left?

Oh, right: if Steve/Vader is Cedric/Luke's father, then who is Cedric/Luke's sister, and why is she wearing a copper-wire bikini while strangling the Haskell/ML crowd/Jabba the Hutt?

Maybe this whole Star Wars analogy thing was a bad idea.

Look, at the end of the day, the whole static-vs-dynamic thing is a red herring. It doesn't matter. The crucial question is whether or not the language being used does two things, and how well it does them:

1. Provide the ability to express the concept in your head, and
2. Provide the ability to evolve as the concepts in your head evolve

There are certain things that are just impossible to do in C++, for example. I cannot represent the C++ AST inside the program itself. (Before you jump all over me, C++ers of the world, take careful note: I'm not saying that C++ cannot represent an AST, but an AST of itself, at the time it is executing.) This is something dynamic languages--most notably Lisp, but also other languages, including Ruby--do pretty well, because they're building the AST at runtime anyway, in order to execute the code in the first place. Could C++ do this? Perhaps, but the larger question is, would any self-respecting C++ programmer want to? Look at your average Ruby program--80% to 90% (the number may vary, but most of the Rubyists I talk to agree its somewhere in this range) of the program isn't really using the meta-object capabilities of the language, and is just a "simpler/easier/scarier/unchecked" object language. Most of the weird-*ss Rubyisms don't show up in your average Ruby program, but are buried away in some library someplace, and away from the view of the average Ruby programmer.

Keep the simple things simple, and make the hard things possible. That' should be the overriding goal of any language, library, or platform.

Erik Meijer coined this idea first, and I like it a lot: Why can't we operate on a basic principle of "static when we can (or should), dynamic otherwise"? (Reverse that if it makes you feel better: "dynamic when we can, static otherwise", because the difference is really only one of gradation. It's also an interesting point for discussion, just how much of each is necessary/desirable.) Doing this means we get the best of both worlds, and we can stop this Galactic Civil War before anybody's planet gets blown up.

'Cuz that would suck.

"OMG, my BFF is so l33t."

"ROFLOL."

There's a generation that looks at the above and rolls their eyes at this, but as it turns out, this is hardly new; in fact, according to Rick Beyer, author of The Greatest Presidential Stories Never Told, we get the phrase "OK" from exactly the same process:

People all over the world know what "O.K." means. But few of them realize it was born fro a wordplay craze and a presidential election.

In all started in Boston in 1838. People there started using humorous initials, sometimes combined with purposeful misspellings, just for fun.

Gosh, this sounds familiar.

Newspapers picked up the fad, and writers had a high old time throwing around all sorts of acronyms.

For example:

g.t.d.h.d = "give the devil his due"

n.g. = "no go"

s. p. = "small potatoes"

O. W. = "Oll Wright (all right)"

G. T. = "Gone to Texas"

And there was another expression that started gaining some currency: "Oll Korrect", or O.K.

So that's what it's supposed to mean.

The fad spread quickly to New York, but the phrase "O.K." didn't come into national use until the presidential campaign of 1840. Democrats trying to reelect Martin Van Buren were casting around for political slogans. Van Buren was from Kinderhook, New York, and was sometimes called "Old Kinderhook". O.K. Political operatives seized on the coincidence. Democrats started forming O.K. clubs and staging O.K. balls. The campaign catapulted the expression into national circulation.

Van Buren lost his bid for reelection. But "O.K." won in a landslide, and is used billions of times a day in all corners of the globe.

l33t.

(BTW, there's 99 more of those, and they're all equally fascinating.)

Recently, a former student asked me,

I was in a .NET web services training class that you gave probably 4 or so years ago on-site at a [company name] office in [city], north of Atlanta.  At that time I asked you for a list of the technical blogs that you read, and I am curious which blogs you are reading now.  I am now with a small company where I have to be a jack of all trades, in the last year I have worked in C++ and Perl backend type projects and web frontend projects with Java, C#, and RoR, so I find your perspective interesting since you also work with various technologies and aren't a zealot for a specific one.

Any way, please either respond by email or in your blog, because I think that others may be interested in the list also.

As one might expect, my blog list is a bit eclectic, but I suppose that's part of the charm of somebody looking to study Java, .NET, C++, Smalltalk, Ruby, Parrot, LLVM, and other languages and environments. So, without further ado, I've pasted in the contents of my OPML file for cut&paste and easy import.

Having said that, though, I would strongly suggest not just blindly importing the whole set of feeds into your nearest RSS reader, but take a moment and go visit each one before you add it. It takes longer, granted, but the time spent is a worthy investment--you don't want to have to declare "blog bankruptcy".

Editor's note: We pause here as readers look at each other and go... "WTF?!?"

"Blog bankruptcy" is a condition similar to "email bankruptcy", when otherwise perfectly high-functioning people give up on trying to catch up to the flood of messages in their email client's Inbox and delete the whole mess (usually with some kind of public apology explaining why and asking those who've emailed them in the past to resend something if it was really important), effectively trying to "start over" with their email in much the same way that Chapter Seven or Chapter Eleven allows companies to "start over" with their creditors, or declaring bankruptcy allows private citizens to do the same with theirs. "Blog bankruptcy" is a similar kind of condition: your RSS reader becomes so full of stuff that you can't keep up, and you can't even remember which blogs were the interesting ones, so you nuke the whole thing and get away from the blog-reading thing for a while.

This happened to me, in fact: a few years ago, when I became the editor-in-chief of TheServerSide.NET, I asked a few folks for their OPML lists, so that I could quickly and easily build a list of blogs that would "tune me in" to the software industry around me, and many of them quite agreeably complied. I took my RSS reader (Newsgator, at the time) and dutifully imported all of them, and ended up with a collection of blogs that was easily into the hundreds of feeds long. And, over time, I found myself reading fewer and fewer blogs, mostly because the whole set was so... intimidating. I mean, I would pick at the list of blogs and their entries in the same way that I picked at vegetables on my plate as a child--half-heartedly, with no real enthusiasm, as if this was something my parents were forcing me to do. That just ruined the experience of blog-reading for me, and eventually (after I left TSS.NET for other pastures), I nuked the whole thing--even going so far as to uninstall my copy of Newsgator--and gave up.

Naturally, I missed it, and slowly over time began to rebuild the list, this time, taking each feed one at a time, carefully weighing what value the feed was to me and selecting only those that I thought had a high signal-to-noise ratio. (This is partly why I don't include much "personal" info in this blog--I found myself routinely stripping away those blogs that had more personal content and less technical content, and I figured if I didn't want to read it, others probably felt the same way.) Over the last year or two, I've rebuilt the list to the point where I probably need to prune a bit and close a few of them back down, but for now, I'm happy with the list I've got.

And speaking of which....

   1: <?xml version="1.0"?>

   2: <opml version="1.0">

   3:  <head>

   4:   <title>OPML exported from Outlook</title>

   5:   <dateCreated>Thu, 15 May 2008 20:55:19 -0700</dateCreated>

   6:   <dateModified>Thu, 15 May 2008 20:55:19 -0700</dateModified>

   7:  </head>

   8:  <body>

   9:   <outline text="If broken it is, fix it you should" type="rss"

  10:   xmlUrl="http://blogs.msdn.com/tess/rss.xml"/>

  11:   <outline text="Artima Developer Buzz" type="rss"

  12:   xmlUrl="http://www.artima.com/news/feeds/news.rss"/>

  13:   <outline text="Artima Weblogs" type="rss"

  14:   xmlUrl="http://www.artima.com/weblogs/feeds/weblogs.rss"/>

  15:   <outline text="Artima Chapters Library" type="rss"

  16:   xmlUrl="http://www.artima.com/chapters/feeds/chapters.rss"/>

  17:   <outline text="Neal Gafter's blog" type="rss"

  18:   xmlUrl="http://gafter.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default"/>

  19:   <outline text="Room 101" type="rss"

  20:   xmlUrl="http://gbracha.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default"/>

  21:   <outline text="Kelly O'Hair's Blog" type="rss"

  22:   xmlUrl="http://weblogs.java.net/blog/kellyohair/index.rdf"/>

  23:   <outline text="John Rose @ Sun" type="rss"

  24:   xmlUrl="http://blogs.sun.com/jrose/feed/entries/atom"/>

  25:   <outline text="The Daily WTF" type="rss"

  26:   xmlUrl="http://syndication.thedailywtf.com/TheDailyWtf"/>

  27:   <outline text="Brad Wilson" type="rss"

  28:   xmlUrl="http://feeds.feedburner.com/BradWilson"/>

  29:   <outline text="Mike Stall's .NET Debugging Blog" type="rss"

  30:   xmlUrl="http://blogs.msdn.com/jmstall/rss.xml"/>

  31:   <outline text="Stevey's Blog Rants" type="rss"

  32:   xmlUrl="http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/atom.xml"/>

  33:   <outline text="Brendan's Roadmap Updates" type="rss"

  34:   xmlUrl="http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/index.rdf"/>

  35:   <outline text="pl patterns" type="rss"

  36:   xmlUrl="http://plpatterns.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default"/>

  37:   <outline text="Joel Pobar's weblog" type="rss"

  38:   xmlUrl="http://feeds.feedburner.com/callvirt"/>

  39:   <outline text="Let&amp;#39;s Kill Dave!" type="rss"

  40:   xmlUrl="http://letskilldave.com/rss.aspx"/>

  41:   <outline text="Why does everything suck?" type="rss"

  42:   xmlUrl="http://whydoeseverythingsuck.com/feeds/posts/defaul