General talk about software patterns

["Chris Finlayson" <cfinlayson AT vls-inc.com>]

Greetings,


Be it right or wrong, the best product technically doesn't always win.  We
know this.  The "us versus them" attitude will do nothing to solve this
(management is stupid, we know better, etc....)

A little "sell" isn't bad, and should in fact be expected.  This was in fact
the philosophy of the mathematician/businessman Dr. Edward Deming who was
hired by the US government to rebuild Japan post-WWII to be a capitalist
society.  His philosophy was to get management and workers together in a
symbiotic relationship and reject the authoritarian/dictatorship management
model that was in vogue in America.  Of course, Japan ended up coming back
stronger than ever where pre-WWII they were viewed as low-quality
manufacturers, and suddenly they started manufacturing higher-quality goods
than America.

Deming's idea: Management must get their hands dirty, and encourage feedback
and communication with workers, and even "sell" them on why it is what
they're doing is productive, beneficial, etc.  Reject the "us vs. them"
attitude.  In the long-run, this makes for (more likely) the best decisions
and a better product.

America and the world has a long way to go.  For example, it goes with
little argument that the metric system is better than the English system of
units of measurement.  The whole world is on the metric system except
Americans, it's more intuitive, blah blah blah (does anybody even know what
a foot-pound is?).  In America, we were supposed to convert to the English
system in the 70's.  Yet few Americans (myself included) ever use the metric
system, and never plan to, even though we may rationally know that it's
better.

Why don't we go to the metric system?  First and foremost, funding for
American education is abysmal, which is where this conversion would have to
take place.  It would mean educating teachers, changing textbooks, etc. -
our government simply doesn't allocate enough funds for education to support
this.  Our government needs to be sold on the idea of conversion.

Likewise, be it right or wrong, Sun and Microsoft have developed end-to-end
enterprise systems to cater to the masses.  Even if we assume that today
someone came out with the "best" programming language ever as judged by a
panel of experts, it'll go nowhere if it doesn't have a well-stated business
case and a vision for the future.  

I've worked for Java shops and Microsoft shops, and right or wrong, the
direction of a company's choice of technology  is influenced by several
factors.  Back in the day, web development was cumbersome at best.  I've
worked with the Microsoft suite of products for web development: biztalk,
commerce server, SQL server, .NET, and the tight integration was a joy, as
was ultimately the lack of coding necessary to accomplish straightforward
tasks.  Our company was working with other companies who had Biztalk servers
already set up, and were SOAP and UDDI compliant and all that good stuff -
we had to communicate with them.  We could've reinvented the wheel, or buy a
Biztalk server ourself and be over-n-done with.  I'm not a Microsoft
evangelist by any means, I don't think they're extraordinarily
groundbreaking in research, but I do think they're good at filtering out
what people have already done, picking and choosing the best-of-breed ideas,
and implementing them in a unified system.  Finally, they communicate the
vision in a manner that buy vs. build decision makers understand.

The latter part is I think the crux of it all - communication and
convincing.  I wouldn't expect the CEO of American Express to understand
software engineering, even though his company is highly dependent on a
quality back-end software product.  He doesn't even know what he doesn't
know.  Likewise, I don't even know what I don't know about being the CEO of
a large company like American Express.  The higher level individuals who are
in charge of making technology decisions can only make their decision based
upon how well the problem and vision is described to them.  I tend to doubt
the CEO of a multi-billion dollar company is an idiot.  Even if he were
convinced that technically a better solution exists, he may be thinking of
interoperability with other companies that have already followed a mold
(e.g. communication via Biztalk). Assuming he's not an idiot, what's lacking
is the proper evangelism and unified idea.

I've been in the commercial world all my life and all I've ever seen, read,
and heard about are Sun and Microsoft.  I'm an engineer know nothing about
Smalltalk outside the examples in the GO4 book.  

With companies like Microsoft and Sun that have so much momentum, it's hard
to believe that any grass-roots programming language will ever dominate
(even if it is superior).  The only way I'd think it'd be viable is if a
business case is developed and communicated effectively to non-technical
decision makers.  Of course, the only motivation to have a business case is
to have a company that would sell a Smalltalk (or whatever) vision.....that
either competes with, or works in conjunction with, the established vendors.



--c.






> -----Original Message-----
> From: 
> patterns-discussion-bounces AT cs.uiuc.edu
>  [mailto:patterns-discussion-
> bounces AT cs.uiuc.edu]
>  On Behalf Of Ralph Johnson
> Sent: Tuesday, October 26, 2004 3:00 AM
> To: Mark Grand; Mike Beedle; 'Pascal Costanza'
> Cc: 
> patterns-discussion AT cs.uiuc.edu
> Subject: Re: [patterns-discussion] Pattern-Oriented Programming
> 
> On 10/24/04 6:10 PM, "Mark Grand" 
> <mgrand AT mindspring.com>
>  wrote:
> 
> > In the commercial sector, it is hard to find Lisp or Smalltalk people.
> > Reimplementing in a more common language will, over time, reduce costs
> and
> > make the progress of software development more predictable.
> 
> This is what managers think.  Managers are wrong.  Converting a Lisp or
> Smalltalk program always increases costs and makes the progress of
> software
> development dramatically less predictable.  It isn't even close.
> 
> I've seen Smalltalk projects in trouble because the programmers all left.
> This was mostly back in the days when Smalltalk was very hot and there
> were
> programmers making $2000 a day.  (Not many, but a few.)  It was hard to
> keep
> good programmers on a project, especially with bad management.  Managers
> didn't have that problem with COBOL or C.  But now Smalltalk is not in
> such
> demand.  Salaries are the same as for other languages and Smalltalk
> programmers don't move around any more than other programmers.
> 
> It is hard to hire a lot of Smalltalkers fast, but it is easy to hire them
> slow.  So, you shouldn't try to have a 100 person Smalltalk project, but
> those were always bad ideas.  Part of the magic of Smalltalk is that you
> can
> do with ten people what would take 100 with another language.
> 
> It is well known that the key to successful software projects is getting
> good people.  Good people prefer productive programming languages.  In my
> experience, the best programmers prefer "weird" languages like Smalltalk
> or
> Lisp.  Or Ruby, or Ocaml.  Productive programming languages let your
> development group be smaller, reducing management problems.
> 
> -Ralph Johnson
> 
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