Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

I spent awhile exchanging email with Bill Kearney today. This was all in reference to this earlier post of mine where I said that there's little point in supporting a feed's stated update interval - and that was the point Bill objected to. Well, there was a reason I said there wasn't much point - very, very few feeds actually tell you what their update frequency is. RSS 0.9x support skipHours and skipDays - hard to deal with, IMHO, and unused by any feed I looked at (including Bill's 0.91>http://www.ideaspace.net/users/wkearney/xml/index.xml] feed, I might add). Then there's RSS 1.0, the overly complex atrocity committed by a bunch of people with way too much time on their hands - no, nothing in the spec to indicate an update interval. I suppose individual feeds could extend their 1.0 feeds with infomration - not that anyone would agree on what that is.... That takes us to RSS 2.0, which has a simple tag - <ttl> (time to live) - that would be easy to support. In fact, BottomFeeder does support it - has since the very first version. But guess what?

So sure, BottomFeeder supports update frequency - but none of the feeds bother with it....

Clarence Westberg points out that Alan Kay gave an interesting talk on software and Squeak via this page:

Alan Kay gave a keynote about how much better 1960s software is than today's software, and he gave an awesome demo of Squeak; it's come a long way and it just plain looks fun to use.

Not sure what conference though :)

John Parkinson has an interesting article on development:

Back in the late seventies and early eighties, when I managed large, complex software projects for a living, I kept track of which programmers were contributing the most to the code we delivered to our customers. A typical development team consisted of eight to ten programmers writing and testing code for three months or so. We usually had about a dozen teams contributing to a development release, so each year I accumulated 40 to 50 sets of productivity data on both teams and individual programmers, covering the efforts of about 100 people. Between 1978 and 1983, I built up a pretty decent performance database.

The results were hugely skewed. Although the productivity of the teams didn't vary much (and everyone worked about as hard as everyone else), almost 75 percent of the final code came from just 5 percent of the programmers. And just about 100 percent of the "best" code (few initial defects, excellent efficiency) came from this same small group.

I think everyone's seen this - large projects tend to get pulled forward by the efforts of a relatively small subset of the entire development population. On some of thos projects, I was completely convinced that (literally) hundreds of developers could be replaced by a team of 1-2 dozen good people. It would certainly be cheaper than outsourcing. John goes on:

Just this year, I've come across a couple of software products that suggest Power Programmers are coming back into the mainstream. The first is Squeak, a sort of grown-up version of Smalltalk, which a few people will remember as the first real object-oriented development environment. Squeak encompasses an operating system, interactive GUI, development environment and tools that can run on anything (including a chip without a built-in operating system) with minimal porting effort (think a couple of weeks by a couple of people). The Squeak kernel code is only a few hundred "objects," which is why it is so easy to port. Squeak was developed entirely by Power Programmers, led by Alan Kay. It's an amazing example of what Power Programming can achieve. Take a look at www.squeak.org.(Squeak is open source too, and it will be interesting to see how, or if, it survives broader exposure.)

I strongly suspect that most open source projects work this way - out of the large body of people allegedly working on them, it's likely the case that a relative handful do most of the heavy lifting. No reason Open Source would be that dramatically different than any other form of development. Another set of interesting points:

With developer productivity and development process effectiveness high on a lot of CIO agendas these days, I'm starting to think again about applying the practices of Power Programmers more widely. I started by going back to my original data from the Seventies and Eighties. If just a few people were writing most of the code, what did the others do? Maybe if I could just identify the right people, I could get by without the rest.

As you might imagine, things were not that simple. Very few of the people on my teams contributed nothing at all, but a lot of them didn't contribute very much. I would have gotten a few additional points of productivity by eliminating a few people who were, in effect, "defect generators" - just no good at writing code.

I also discovered that although experience mattered, several of the Power Programmers were actually quite junior. And there was some work Power Programmers just wouldn't do - testing, documentation, release management and so on - that needs to get done if projects are to be commercially successful. The less accomplished programmers often ended up with in these roles.

I wonder how XP plays into that testing assumption. I suspect that John's Power Programmers wouldn't do large scale (after development) testing - but based on the people I see involved at the top of XP, I suspect that it's the way it's done, not the actual act. Interesting points anyway - well worth reading in full

There's more ranting about RSS this morning. Ted Leung cites Bill Kearney's post on "bad" RSS readers. What's a bad reader, you ask? According to Bill:

How about we all start mining our server logs and start 'outing' the bad RSS readers? Ones that don't:

• honor scheduling instructions
• use gzip to save bandwidth
• follow and learn from redirects
• use eTags
• understand HTTP headers

Now, BottomFeeder does the big ones there - etags and gzip. I'm not sure what he means by "understand HTTP headers" - too vague. As to schedule - well, that's harder than he seems to think. For non-blogs, there may well be a regular update schedule. For blogs though - they tend to be "as the blogger decides to post". Heck, I've noticed that many of the news sites I read have updates more frequently than their schedule claims - so I'm not sure how much value that tag has in the real world. Supporting it wouldn't be hard; I'm just not sure it buys a lot.

Earlier, I posted support for another Bill Kearney rant on RSS feed bloat. However, I don't fully agree with him. He wants RSS feeds to be headlines only, and have the end user follow the links to full content. That works for news - but I hate that posting mode for blogs. When I said I don't want full content, I meant that I don't want a whole HTML page buried in the description. Headlines only I find irritating.

There's another interesting trend starting to pop up in this conversation thread over on Sam Ruby's Blog. Reading all the way through, I get the distinct impression that these people haven't seen NNTP. Why do I get that impression? Because the whole direction of the comment API, embedding RSS in other contexts, etc. - the direction that's heading is threaded conversations. Well, we have that already, in a non-bloated format - it's called NNTP. I suggest that these guys set up a moderated news group on one of their servers, because it will save them a whole lot of time and effort....

I read this post on the usage of browsers with interest - IE is not at the same level of dominance (at least with the technical user population) that one might think. So I decided to analyze my site logs a bit, and came up with some interesting numbers. I just sliced and diced on things I recognized in the logs. One interesting thing - no one hit the site with Safari today. Here's what I got:

Agent	Percentage of Hits
Internet Explorer	31.8%
Mozilla/Netscape	20.7%
Opera	0.5%

Now, you'll see that there's way less than 100% there. It turns out that a significant proportion of the daily hits on my site are with RSS Agents and Bots. I threw bots into 'other'; here are the RSS stats:

Agent	Percentage of Hits
BottomFeeder	23.1%%
SharpReader	4.1%
Radio Userland	2.7%
Other	17%

Now, the BottomFeeder statistics are elevated for this site, but it's still interesting that about 30% of the site's hits are for the RSS feed. It's also fascinating that Mozilla, rather than being insignificant (as it's often reported), is a sizable chunk. Looks like IE may actually have competition.

This is just too precious for words. In the RSS/blogging universe, there's this sharp divide between RDF (RSS 1.0) and RSS (every other version). This is part of the whole "David Winer vs. the world" thing going on. I actually have some sympathy with both points of view - I look at RDF, and see needless complexity - it fails the whole XP YAGNI as far as I'm concerned - it was designed based on presumed future needs, something that I always wonder about. On the other hand, it's not as if I've studied the issue in anything like a comprehensive form, and a fair number of otherwise intelligent people sem to think it's useful.

Slashdot has a story on Don and John's Smalltalk implementation for .NET. Hat tip to David Buck for pointing this out.

I read this story in Eweek - and it fits with other stuff I've read recently:

As of this moment, the security level of the Internet has taken a big hit. And it's not because of a new worm or some nefarious hacker collective; it's because of a set of badly conceived laws that have been passed by several states.

These measures, referred to as Super DMCA laws (see Freedom-to-Tinker's Super DMCA page) are badly designed laws promoted by the Motion Picture Association of America. Super DMCA legislation has already been passed in Colorado, Delaware, Illinois, Michigan, Oregon, Pennsylvania and Wyoming.

One of the common aspects of these laws is that they make illegal any device or program that can "conceal or to assist another to conceal from any communication service provider or from any lawful authority the existence or place of origin or destination of any communication." Aside from LaBrea, this makes a whole set of common IT programs and hardware illegal, from firewalls to VPNs to privacy applications.

So if you live in one of these states, you are now breaking the law if you run a firewall. And if you're an IT admin that has all of your internal systems running on NAT, you could face as much as five years in prison and up to a quarter-million-dollar fine.

Wow. Cluelessness and venality know no bounds....

So here I am at the first meeting of the Maryland XP group - first thing was organizational stuff - who's here, when to meet, all of that kind of stuff. Hey, I got Smalltalk out there as one of the Productive Events ideas :)

The DC group is a little too far a drive to be convenient for me on an ongoing basis - weekly codefests are a long haul. The Baltimore beltway isn't nearly the hassle that the DC beltway is - so even though this is about as far away mile-wise, it's a lot closer time-wise.

So what's the plan? Next time, it looks like an Extreme Hour is going to be organized. I've never actually been involved in one, so that should be interesting.

So on with the meeting itself - Chris Davies reports on attending an ObjectMentor XP class. The class was taught with both C++ and Java. Sounds like they had a good time - listening to Bob Martin hold forth was probably worth the trip all by itself - agree with him or disagree with him (I've done both), he's a very good speaker.

Now I'm paying. I have to look at C++ code..... Looks like if you're doing C++ development with the MS Visual C++ tools, you're still in hell from a refactoring standpoint. Gads, how to people put up with this stuff?

Interesting conversation with the group though. A lot of smart people showed up, with some interesting viewpoints on XP, how to start using XP, how to advocate for XP.

Hmmm. I'm going to have to take a look at this FitNesse stuff that Ward has been working on....

So here I am at the first meeting of the Maryland XP group - first thing was organizational stuff - who's here, when to meet, all of that kind of stuff. Hey, I got Smalltalk out there as one of the Productive Events ideas :)

The DC group is a little too far a drive to be convenient for me on an ongoing basis - weekly codefests are a long haul. The Baltimore beltway isn't nearly the hassle that the DC beltway is - so even though this is about as far away mile-wise, it's a lot closer time-wise.

So what's the plan? Next time, it looks like an Extreme Hour is going to be organized. I've never actually been involved in one, so that should be interesting.

So on with the meeting itself - Chris Davies reports on attending an ObjectMentor XP class. The class was taught with both C++ and Java. Sounds like they had a good time - listening to Bob Martin hold forth was probably worth the trip all by itself - agree with him or disagree with him (I've done both), he's a very good speaker.

Now I'm paying. I have to look at C++ code..... Looks like if you're doing C++ development with the MS Visual C++ tools, you're still in hell from a refactoring standpoint. Gads, how to people put up with this stuff?

Interesting conversation with the group though. A lot of smart people showed up, with some interesting viewpoints on XP, how to start using XP, how to advocate for XP.

Hmmm. I'm going to have to take a look at this FitNesse stuff that Ward has been working on....

I'm off to a new XP group forming up - I'll have news later

I'm off to a new XP group forming up - I'll have news later

Tim Bray is not amused about the current state of RSS. in particular, he complains about two things:

• HTML in the <description> tag
• Relative URLS not working in RSS

Relative urls have been a headache for me in BottomFeeder - based on the information in the data you get, it's sometimes hard to impossible to guess where a link belongs. The HTML thing has been less of an issue for me; maybe I'm just not paying attention, I don't know. Go read Tim's rant in full - it's worth some thought.

I saw this comment about EJB on one of the Java advocacy groups:

Question: Someone have a clue how many companies are really using EJB ?

Answer: Only the ones that want to hear the big iron groan under the load

To that I spotted this quick rejoinder:

And .NET is for those that want to hear the small iron groan under the load

lol

Deathblogs? Here's a trend I didn't see coming

Finding such weblogs is a challenge, since there's rarely any warning that entries are about to cease. Because idle and abandoned blogs are more the rule than the exception, it's impossible to tell if a site is simply being ignored or its creator has, in fact, died.

But deathblogs, to coin a term, do seem to offer comfort to those left behind, whether the sites are visited regularly or not.

Weblogger Rebecca Kris, a Carnegie Mellon University student, was killed in a car accident last year, leaving her blog behind. The posts call out to her by the dozens -- "Thank you for touching my life" -- hoping, perhaps, that even in the afterlife, we all might have Internet access.

shudder. Who knew?

It's only been 10 years since Mosaic came out. Hard to believe....

BottomFeeder now has slightly better international support. It turns out that displaying non-English characters had some basic problems straight from the Http query - the mime code in VW was not getting the character encodings right. That's fixed. Which means that, if your current locale (as set in the OS) has a font matching the one coming in, it will display properly. Unfortunately, if your Locale contains no matching font, it won't. I intend to solve this problem, but have run out of steam for the day. It's a start.

This could be me during the work week....

I wasn't entirely happy with the real estate the button layout took in the latest BottomFeeder builds. So i rearranged the buttons to the top, and it got a lot better. However, the 'New' and 'Alerts' buttons really shouldn't always be enabled; they should only be enabled if there new or alert items available. That took a little bit of work in terms of state tracking, but it's done now. I think the end result is a cleaner UI. Now, if I get around to finishing the blogger API work, I could send out a general blog posting tool with BottomFeeder as a plugin....

With NASA grounded after the shuttle thing, this news is very interesting:

A private manned spaceflight program was unveiled Friday at a desert airport where it has been in secret development by famed aircraft designer Burt Rutan for two years.

A rocket plane, dubbed SpaceShipOne, and the White Knight, an exotic jet designed to carry it aloft for a high-altitude air launch, were shown off in a hangar at Mojave Airport, where Rutan developed Voyager, the airplane that made the first nonstop, unrefueled flight around the world in 1986.

The stubby-winged SpaceShipOne, built by Rutan's Scaled Composites LLC, is designed to carry three people on a suborbital flight to an altitude of 62.5 miles. Rutan set no date for the first attempt, which will come after captive-carry flights and drop tests.

As a big sci-fi and space program fan, I'm always interested in news that looks like progress on that front

I periodically see people make the claim that Cincom and IBM are the only major Smalltalk dialects, or the only Enterprise Ready Smalltalk dialects. Now obviously, I'm of the opinion that VisualWorks is the best choice for development, regardless. However, there are other things out there, and they are progressing quite nicely. The Dolphin Smalltalk guys just pushed out an update to their major release 5, for instance. Unlike Java, where you get Sun - or Sun - or Sun - in Smalltalk, we have a wide variety of dialects meeting the diverse development needs of the market. Go visit Why Smalltalk to see what I mean.

The previous post here mentioned the big fur fight over here. Going back to the original post, there's some good points that I think have been missed - by everyone in that thread except Mark.

Here's the deal. The end users of an aggregator are the important part of the equation. Yes, the producer of the content does have a responsibility to create valid content - they should not purposely create bad XML. However, the producer of the aggregator has a responsibility as well - the end user doesn't care one way or the other. Valid XML? All required fields present? They don't care. What they care about is being able to subscribe to the content they are interested in. What does that mean for the aggregator? It means that you have to bend over backwards to accept bad content. This is where the real world goes, btw - look at what web browsers do in order to display HTML.

You can argue all you want that XML is supposed to be different, and cry about how it makes your life as a developer harder - but none of that matters. The end users could not care less about your problems on the development side. If your tool doesn't show the content they want, they'll find someone else's tool. Aha! It seems we've stumbled on a valid commercial reason for being liberal in what you accept...

Wow. If you didn't think that technical arguments could get ugly, then you haven't been following this little dustup over on Sam Ruby's blog. It looks like it got started with this post from Mark Pilgrim. You have to read all the way back to the beginning of the thread to figure out what it's about - it devolved into a huge pissing match almost immediately. I guess you don't need politics or religion in an argument to get the fur flying :)

Grass grows everywhere you don't want it, and nowhere you do want it

I spent the afternoon pulling weeds out of our gardens - tomorrow we'll plant flowers. I came to the above conclusion in my back yard - there are bare spots here and there where I've been trying to coax grass to grow for three years. Meanwhile, my gardens were filling up with the stuff. Maybe this is a metaphor for life I'm not getting :)

One of the great things about having Rich Demers help out on BottomFeeder is all the "small stuff" that I miss, but he picks up on. Things like bad tab order, shortcut keys that don't work right - all the things that a developer can easily miss, but an end user is going to be extremely frustrated by. I fixed a bunch of things this afternoon that had been broken - some for quite awhile - because of Rich's prodding. Thanks Rich!

I have a ton of miles on American Airlines, so this news affects me. Not nearly as much as it affects all the people working for the airline though. This whole fiasco points out something interesting to me:

FORT WORTH, Texas (CNN) -- Outraged by news that troubled American Airlines had planned to give its executives bonuses, flight attendants rescinded their approval of wage cuts and plan to vote again, a union official said late Friday.

It seems that senior management often forgets that the fate of their company rests on "the little people" who do the day to day work. If they forget too much, it can lead to ugly spats like the one we see being played out in public at AA. Always a good idea to reflect on how decisions will play with the rank and file, I think. This doesn't mean that every decision has to be poll tested; it does mean that corporate leaders should be aware of the possibility of blowback...

I got a few things fixed in BottomFeeder, and posted the new parcel up to the dev download area. There were a few odd things with marking items read/unread in the new views - code that made assumptions that were no longer true. That's fixed now, and the tool should behave in a much more reasonable fashion now

And what a simplistic mess it is. No security. No way to have titles for posts. No way to have categories for posts. I guess the first guy on the block often does win, because this thing is awful

Smalltalk Solutions 2003 Announces Show Committee and Keynote Speakers

CARY, North Carolina April 18, 2003 - The Smalltalk Industry Council (STIC) is proud to announce the conference committee for Smalltalk Solutions 2003. Smalltalk Solutions is the premier forum for Smalltalk users, developers, and enthusiasts. This year's conference will be held on July 14-16 in Toronto, Canada.

Please direct your questions and comments about this year's show to the appropriate conference chairperson:

Conference Chairperson	Allen Davis, Knowledge Systems Corp.
Sponsorship/Exhibitor Chairperson	Joy Murray, Cincom Systems, Inc. jmurray@cincom.com
Technical Chairperson	Alan Knight, Cincom Systems, Inc. aknight@cincom.com
Financial Chairperson	Monty Williams, GemStone monty.williams@gemstone.com
Conference Coordinator	Jason Jones, whysmalltalk.com jjones@whysmalltalk.com
Marketing Chairperson	Andrew Ignatow, Cincom Systems, Inc. aignatow@cincom.com

The Smalltalk Solutions 2003 Conference Board is also pleased to announce this year's keynote speakers:

Scott Ambler - Are You Agile or Are You Fragile?

Abstract: The software process landscape is changing. A shift from large-scale, prescriptive processes that define rigorous procedures and policies to lighter, more agile methodologies is clearly underway within the IT industry. This is more than an idle fad that promises to disappear next year ? agile processes are here to stay. Are these processes appropriate for your organization? If so, which ones should you consider adopting? What challenges can you expect to experience as you adopt these new processes and how can you overcome them? Bio: Scott Ambler is a Senior Consultant with Ronin International, Inc. since its inception in 1999. He actively works with Ronin clients on large-scale, software development projects and on software process improvement (SPI) efforts around the world.

Scott is a Senior Contributing Editor with Software Development magazine and a member of the Flashline Software Development Productivity Council. He can be reached via e-mail at scott.ambler@ronin-intl.com.

David A. Smith - Croquet - A Collaboration Architecture

Abstract: Croquet is a computer software architecture built from the ground up with a focus on deep collaboration between teams of users. It is a totally open, totally free, highly portable extension to the Squeak programming system, a modern variant of Smalltalk. Croquet is a complete development and delivery platform for doing real collaborative work. There is no distinction between the user environment and the development environment. Croquet is a joint project being developed by David A. Smith, Alan Kay, David P. Reed, and Andreas Raab. More information is available at: http://www.opencroquet.org. Bio: David A. Smith has been focused on interactive 3D and using 3D as a basis for new user environments and entertainment for almost 20 years. He created "The Colony", the very first 3D interactive game and precursor to today's "first-person shooters" like Quake ... except Colony ran on a Macintosh in 1987. The Colony won the "Best Adventure Game of the Year" award from Macworld Magazine.

In 1989, David used the technologies developed for the game to create a virtual set and virtual camera system that was used by Jim Cameron for the movie "The Abyss". Based upon this experience, David founded Virtus Corporation in 1990 and developed Virtus Walkthrough, the first real-time 3D design application for personal computers.

In 2000, David joined forces with Alan Kay, David Reed, and Andreas Raab to develop a totally new kind of software. Croquet is intended to completely change the way you use a computer, transforming it from a closed box with very low bandwidth communication channels to a high-bandwidth collaboration and multi-user, idea processing engine.

About the Smalltalk Industry Council

The Smalltalk Industry Council (STIC) is a nonprofit trade association whose goal is to promote awareness of and increase demand for Smalltalk. STIC was reorganized in 2003 by Cincom, GemStone, IBM, and Knowledge Systems Corporation, creating a cohesive Smalltalk community where information, technical issues, new ideas, and concerns are openly discussed to benefit businesses as well as the software industry. STIC's membership consists of users, service providers, and vendors of Smalltalk tools, components, databases, and services. For more information on STIC, please visit www.stic.org.

2003 Smalltalk Industry Council All Rights Reserved

A fair bit of Booch slamming takes place in the XP mailing list as well - although I give Grady a lot of credit for taking part in that list, and giving as good as he gets. Ted has a large rant here:

Chief Scientist, Rational Corporation. I'm not exactly sure what a "Chief Scientist" is or does, but it apparently doesn't have much to do with developing software: Rational Rose for years was one of (if not the most) unstable development environments I've ever had the distinct displeasure of having to use. It crashed on a regular basis, frequently losing work in the process (once during a save, no less), and for a while there it was pretty common to see Rose generate code that wouldn't compile. This is not what you call a quality product. (It's fair to ask why Rose is arguably the Number One UML IDE in the world right now; in response, I ask you to name at least three other UML tools that have been around for five or so years. TogetherSoft didn't have a product out until well after Rose had pretty much established itself as the only game in town, and ArgoUML and MagicDraw came much, much later. It's pretty easy to win a race when you're the only contestant--and lo, and behold, the software came from the same company more or less doing all the work on UML itself. Think there was some "leakage" of specs under development there?)

It goes on from there; read the whole thing

Seems I never updated the dev links after 2.8 was released. I had that pointed out to me in the Smalltalk IRC channel, and fixed up the links. The .tar.gz files there are not completely up to date - download the files in this directory to get the latest parcels. Just replace whatever is in the 'app' directory now.

Heh. I saw this on Dewayne Mikkleson's blog:

If you save your plugin into a "plugins" subdirectory, SharpReader will find the plugin and make it available in the listview popup menu (shortcut ^B).

Clarence Westberg finds C# to be a drag compared to Smalltalk:

C# and Smalltalk

Back in C# development again, what a drag compared to smalltalk. Productivity dropping at an astounding rate.

Have been using C# Reafactory a lot. I would recommend it to any C# developer.

Have been declaring a lot of things as type object to get around the typing BS of C. In the end you always end up having to cast everything anyway!

more anecdotal evidence that C# is Java in Microsoft clothing...

Bob Lewis of Infoworld writes:

What was the primary practical difference between the world's failed communist economies and its successful capitalist ones? The communist bloc nations managed their economies centrally, whereas capitalist nations decentralized theirs. Most IT organizations look more like communism than capitalism. See for yourself:

• IT has a fixed budget, which its leaders allocate. Sometimes they form a steering committee (politburo) to share the responsibility. It's central planning.
• If the central planners don't understand the value of a request, the request has no value and is rejected. IT's government decides what has value, not consumers.
• IT is the sole supplier. Demand is satisfied through central production or not at all. IT's government owns the means of production.

Even our desire for industry standards has a communist overtone. Our need for compatibility vastly outweighs any desire to choose from a variety of suppliers. In IT, real choice in the marketplace is a bad thing.

That sure looks a lot like communism to me.

Maybe that goes a ways towards explaining the large failure rates in IT projects - see here and here.