| last updated:06 Aug 2003 14:55 UK time |
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| JOS Statistics - Recent Comments (Comments added for week ending Sun 16 Mar 2003) | View Other Weeks |
| Preferences vs. advanced users. | Sun 16 Mar | mortee |
| Well, this is my first post here, I dont know the habits, I dont know if Joel actually reads this forum or if this was discussed in the past. Anyway, Ill address this to him. So, I just read the on-line chapter of your book of the title Choices. You write there: `` But wait! you say. Its important to have options for advanced users who want to tweak their environments! In reality, its not as important as you think. This reminds me of when I tried to switch to a Dvorak keyboard. The trouble was, I dont use one computer. I use all kinds of computers. I use other peoples computers. I use three computers fairly regularly at home and three at work. I use computers in the test lab at work. The trouble with customizing your environment is that it just doesnt propagate, so its not even worth the trouble. While agreeing to some extent, I have to object. I agree, because regarding the current common situation in computing, its true that preferences dont propagate, so after all its not even worth tweaking. I consider myself an advanced user, I use mutiple computers, I have to migrate from time to time, I have to reinstall the OS (while far not as often as you write) and so on. So, I indeed ended up not bothering with my settings, right out of the very reason you mention. But for two reasons, I dont agree. First, while I use multiple computers, I have a primary one, which I use most of the time. So, its mostly acceptable to tweak that one to the best of my preference, and somehow Ill get used to having a different environment on the other, less frequently used boxes. Some settings can even be transferred among them, partly right because Im a sort of advanced user, who finds ways to do so a novice might not know. Second, you encourage a workaround, instead of a solution to the existing problem. Instead of proposing a way how the preferences could be migrated through space and time, you encourage (or at least suppose) the users to not bother tweaking their environments, and for that reason, you encourage the developers to not include advanced options in their programs, because the users wont use them anyway. What I think about such oprions or preferences is that they should hide beneath what they refer to, as opposed to (or perhaps in addition to) lie on bloated preference panels. They simply shouldnt appear on the surface until the user specifically wants to tweak that aspect of the environment. They shouldnt interrupt the user, or distract attention. They shouldnt force the user to make a (irrelevant) decision. For that reason, they indeed should have very reasonable defaults, so that the given aspect just works. But when specifically asked for, when they really become relevant, and the user *wants* to make a decision, then they should be there for service. |
| Sun 16 Mar | Bored Bystander | Hmm, this is a really good topic! You said: >> What I think about such oprions or preferences is that they should hide beneath what they refer to, as opposed to (or perhaps in addition to) lie on bloated preference panels. They simply shouldn't appear on the surface until the user specifically wants to tweak that aspect of the environment. They shouldn't interrupt the user, or distract attention. They shouldn't force the user to make a (irrelevant) decision. For that reason, they indeed should have very reasonable defaults, so that the given aspect 'just works'. But when specifically asked for, when they really become relevant, and the user *wants* to make a decision, then they should be there for service. It sounds like you are basically saying that if preferences are closely associated visually and operationally with the features that they control, and if those preferences are not a distraction, then preferences should be designed into products... Given that Joel has made a living as a sort of user interface expert, my guess is that he had already anticipated these practices as objections when he wrote the paragraph you quoted. Personally - I think *every* SW developer wants to pride himself on 'ease of use' and 'intuitiveness' and 'flow' in his work. Only the real jackasses I've had the displeasure of working with have said or acted in a way to imply that the user interface isn't important or not worth the time to refine. So in a way you're implying a negative 'strawman' - that developers may seek ways of interrupting the user's flow with needless option setting requests and that developers would knowingly segregate option settings into nonintuitive and arbitrary parts of the software, and that these tendencies, once addressed, would solve the 'preferences' problem for all. Here's my $0.02: The prevailing practice of grouping preferences onto a (likely notebook tabbed) centralized dialog box in an application has seemed to evolve as a sort of canon among most SW companies since it's a non controversial, least common denominator. I agree with your implication that this is a clumsy non-metaphor that separates functions from options. In a 'perfect' world, there would be universal and commonly known pointing device gestures that would invoke property settings of elements of the application. IE: perhaps you'd somehow gesture on the text in a word processor and the program would 'guess' that you wanted to change the font. I am guessing that this is an example of your idea. But at least with the current way that things are - if a user sits down to an application that is new to him, he 'knows' that there is an excellent chance that an Options, Settings or Preferences window lives under one of the menus labeled Edit, View or File in most Windows applications. It may be a 'lumpy' and inelegant way of representing application properties but it's an easy to understand and portable representation - once you know that you're looking for program settings. You could find Preferences or Options in Quickbooks or Visual Studio .Net or 'My Lawyer'. Let me propose the following thought exercise: pick a common desktop application type. Lay out your idea of how a few common 'Preferences' type settings in such an application might be controlled with a more intuitive design. The point is, if you can show a specific example of how things could be done, then the idea may hold up better. |
| Sun 16 Mar | Bored Bystander | Let me add to that challenge: propose such user interface settings that manipulate *hidden* or non visual behaviors of the product. IE: one example of the kind of visual and unburied option setting that you're seeking is resizing of columns and windows in an application. But in my mind, that's just too easy and most programs implement things like that anyway. So the 'rule' here would be that the property or option doesn't have an obvious, draggable or clickable aspect to it that involves simple repositioning. Good luck, if you choose to take on this challenge. I'm open minded. I'd like to see what you can come up with. Perhaps my brain has been 'conditioned' by too much exposure to other people's limited notions... |
| Sun 16 Mar | mortee | 'It sounds like you are basically saying that if preferences are closely associated visually and operationally with the features that they control, and if those preferences are not a distraction, then preferences should be designed into products...' Yes. At least from the user's PoV. The main reason against measureless options has been that they 1.) make hard to find what the user is really looking for, 2.) they interrupt the user or distract attention, 3.) they enforce the user to make explicit decisions about irrelevant things. So, as long as those circumstances don't stand, more options are good. From the support PoV, having more options may have further impacts. That's what I'm not discussing here. 'So in a way you're implying a negative 'strawman' - that developers may seek ways of interrupting the user's flow with needless option setting requests and that developers would knowingly segregate option settings into nonintuitive and arbitrary parts of the software' You misinterpret my statements. I haven't said with a word that this is intentional. This common situation has many reasons I don't want to discuss here either, but the basic thing is that it's much more comfortable, and needs much less thought from the developer to throw every tweakable option on a preferences panel (or even into a rc-file), than to lay out intuitively. 'and that these tendencies, once addressed, would solve the 'preferences' problem for all.' Again, no. I just said that the approach proposed in the book is broken in my opinion. Especially out of the reason given there (migration problems). I haven't stated that I knew the ultimate solution to the preferences issue, just that it would deserve a different approach. 'The prevailing practice of grouping preferences onto a (likely notebook tabbed) centralized dialog box in an application has seemed to evolve as a sort of canon among most SW companies since it's a non controversial, least common denominator. I agree with your implication that this is a clumsy non-metaphor that separates functions from options. ' Glad you agree on that. 'In a 'perfect' world, there would be universal and commonly known pointing device gestures that would invoke property settings of elements of the application. IE: perhaps you'd somehow gesture on the text in a word processor and the program would 'guess' that you wanted to change the font. I am guessing that this is an example of your idea.' Not really. Two points here. When you are working on a text document, the font used is likely to be somewhat relevant to you, so preferences thereof may be exposed. Either on a toolbar, or a palette, or anything. If you don't like it, you can close the palette, and access it subsequently from a menu later. No big magic here. Second, for visual things, you always can have an option in the context-menu which offers you possibility to tweak the there-relevant options. If you right-clicked something, then it is probably of some interest to you, so it's a good place to access related options from there. In a way not mixed with other options which belong to things miles away. So, again, no magic gestures needed. 'But at least with the current way that things are - if a user sits down to an application that is new to him, he 'knows' that there is an excellent chance that an Options, Settings or Preferences window lives under one of the menus labeled Edit, View or File in most Windows applications. ' Has anyone said that various things should have only one way to access them? If you recall, I wrote 'preferences ... should hide beneath what they refer to, as opposed to (or perhaps in addition to) lie on bloated preference panels'. So, the nitty-detail preferences should be accessible starting from what they refer to. They shouldn't appear on the main preferences panel of the app, as they wouldn't either anyway if these options would just not made options. And then, the (probably advanced) user may need sometimes to be able to look over *all* of the possible existing preferences. Since this is surely a very rare need, and used only in very special cases, it's not a big drawback if this interface is not intuitive or easy-to-use. So, there should be an 'advanced' preferences panel, which isn't at all designed for everyday use, and where all imaginable preference options appear, in a list. This should just be a secondary (or umpteenth) way to access them. Just look at Mozilla's about:config. That's a good example of this. It may probably be used once every leap year, so its absolutely un-intuitive design is not a problem, but it collects everything that is accessible in some way in the application. 'The point is, if you can show a specific example of how things could be done, then the idea may hold up better.' Well, I haven't implied myself to be an UI expert. I haven't even stated I can do better (while it may be so). I just said there *may* be a better way, which may possibly be looked for, instead of taking the short way with a workaround. But anyway, see above for a five-minute approach. Anyone can do even better with a bit of real thought. 'Let me add to that challenge: propose such user interface settings that manipulate *hidden* or non visual behaviors of the product. IE: one example of the kind of visual and unburied option setting that you're seeking is resizing of columns and windows in an application. But in my mind, that's just too easy and most programs implement things like that anyway.' Well, OK. You picked a good example, 'cause that may apply to both of the sides you mention. See below. 'So the 'rule' here would be that the property or option doesn't have an obvious, draggable or clickable aspect to it that involves simple repositioning.' So, the column header is a good test case, because it's indeed quite a straightforward to simply resize the columns - but what about selecting which columns you wanna see? That's not that evident, right? Usually, settings for that are put into some menu; I even saw apps that had that preference hidden on some settings panel. Quite far from what we want to control. A much better place is to put it on a right-click menu at the column headers. That way, you access it where it belongs to; and it doesn't pollute the settings panel or the menu either. If we go more abstract, towards much less visible behaviours - well, I can't give a definitive, ultimate solution. But just out of quick thought, if the given aspect of the program is possible to ever become *really* relevant to the user, so that s/he explicitely wants to make a decision about it; then it may worth visualizing that aspect of the behaviour (in a non-distractive way), so that it has an interface where the related options may get an intuitive way to access. And then, for really non-visualizable aspects, there always are the settings panels. They aren't quite appealing, they are usually mentally far from what they refer to, but still a means to express preferences. For what's really needed to allow tweaking, it's a good place. And I still haven't said that every imaginable aspect of every non-visualizable behaviour of a program should be made settable. Just to a reasonable extent. Anyway, let me bring an example. Let's say, I, as a non-novice user, want to explicitely control how much of my bandwidth is committed to different uses. That's a fairly non-visual issue, right? A novice user is probably not really interested in this question, so a good default behaviour should be set for him or her. But what about making it possible to visualize the currently existing data flows going through my pipe? I am probably interested in the candidates I currently have, so I want to see those, not all possible cases. So, I may get my hands on a list or graph of various current traffic - and I immediately have an intuitive place on the screen to right-click on, get a panel where I can drag a slider or enter a value. Sure, making possible every such (perhaps considered braindead) case would be an impossible task for the developer. Or more precisely, it would be so if all those would have to be hand-made, one by one. But if I (as an advanced user, not necessarily in a trivial way) could just express to the system that I wanted a list of all the connections currently going through my uplink, grouped e.g. by protocol (a list of objects with various attributes, after all), then the programmer doesn't have to explicitely support this. Hope you get the generic idea behind what I am writing. And to turn a bit back to my original post, just to emphasize a bit the essence thereof: I haven't intended to propose a better means to handle preferences, just stated that if served in an acceptable form, then migration problems shouldn't be a reason to not allow the user to tweak some aspects s/he may be interested in. |
| Sun 16 Mar | Albert D. Kallal | Lets not forget that part of the point being made here is that every option you see in the those config tabs is often a setting that the developers could NOT decide on. Thus, they throw it into a config option, and let you decide. Also, often, a good deal of those tabs are very superficial stuff anyway. Basically, what is being said is yea, give the person some options, but those options are generally not that important. Changing the background color of ms-word to a deep blue, and the characters to a nice white does NOT really change how ms-word works. It is not big deal, but keeps the user happy! However, we don’t have any options in word to set the memory and buffer size used. We don’t have those options because the developers were intelligent enough to sit down and figure out what is best for us. Further, those developers write this stuff for a living, and know much better what those settings should be anyway! Sometimes you can expose some of these options, but in fact make the situation worse. A great example of this is the virtual memory settings in windows. I can’t tell how often I seen some bad tech person change the virtual memory setting from auto to some REAL STUPID setting. So, much of the point being made here is that often (not always) those config/control panels are results of poor developers, or a team that could not come to a decision about how the system should work. The real golden rule here is that as a developer you want to make the most sensible decision, but at same time make sure the user is in control. What do I mean by “in control”, but not too many choices? In Joel’s interface book he talks about how a nice shopping cart that rolls and turns EXACTLY THE way you want. This is how good software should be. When you turn the cart, it should turn EXACTLY the way you want. You are in control! However, if upon entering the grocery store you are presented with a list of 20 different types of ball bearings to CHOOSE BEFORE you have to use the shopping cart, then that is stupid. I don’t know if I want stainless steel ball bearings, or carbon Teflon coated ball bearings. I have no clue here. Maybe one ball bearing type is better for carrying real heavy duty cases of Coca-Cola and frozen pizza’s . A one day supply of programmers pop and pizza will generally overload and cause damage to a average shopping cart. Perhaps, if the shopping store is smart, they will make a leaky abstraction, and simply ask your profession before you get the shopping cart. At this point, the store would then install the correct type of ball bearings for you!! (all software developers will get pop and pizza ready shopping carts with extra big wheels). At the end of the day, what I really hope is that the designer of the shopping cart already made the correct decisions for me. They will make a good judgement call as to what kind of ball bearings should be in that cart. This decision may not be the best if you need 20 frozen turkeys (or a 2 hours supply of pop and pizza for some programmers I know!). I mean, do I really care if ms-word is supposed to use a recursive spell checking routine Vs a binary tree Vs a hash code scheme? A poor software developer will not be able to decide this, and thus give a user all 3 types of options. (on the other hand, if you are selling a legal text search system, then all those options may very well be needed). Thus, this whole point here is about making intelligent decisions FOR THE user. Thus, we make the users happy by given them some config options, but only fluffy stuff like changing the backdrop color etc. The real meat and potatoes decisions are made by the very good and intelligent developer. Further, the other main point here is that all of us are willing to give up a slight amount of personalization to our computers in return for a given amount of standardizing (the keyboard example was given). I for example spent the time to learn how to use the ftp client in IE5 and IE6. It is great to use this ftp client, but it is not as good as the ZILLION ftp clients available on the web. However, my time is simply too valuable these days. By spending the effort to learn the IE ftp client, then EVERY SINGLE computer I walk to now has that ftp client. I never have to install it, and all computers have this ftp client. I hate setting up a computer each time I need ftp access to my server files. Thus, last but not least, the point here is that you need to make sensible decisions for your users, but allow the advanced users some config abilities. It goes without saying that those advanced features are out of sight and out of mind for most users. There is always the advanced tab!! Joel’s other book on interface stuff is mostly on line, and is really fabulous. It is where I got the shopping cart reference from. Check out: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000057.html Albert D. Kallal Edmonton, Alberta Canada Kallal@msn.com |
| Sun 16 Mar | mortee | I TOTALLY agree. I absolutely see the *crucial* importance of developers providing *reasonable* defaults to everything that even can have a default. It is very important to *save* the user the need to make decisions s/he simply doesn't want to make. I haven't intended to protect developers' inability to make those decisions. If you read through my posts again, you can find out that I stressed the importance of provided defaults. And I haven't said either that I would like access to things like the used mapping construct in word's spell checker. Those are things that really belong to the developer. I don't have anything to do with them, unless I have to deal with the source code to word. Again, my intent was to stress a bit on the importance of giving control to the user where s/he may really want it (even at places where an exposed decision opportunity would confuse novice users). So, if I *really* do care, I should be able to ask for a chart that e.g. can hold less, but turns better. Nothing specifically about the ball bearings, just a decision that is relevant to me. Regarding the IE as FTP client issue: that's also true. You better not set up every simgle computer you have work with just to be able to access your server. But that still doesn't explain why you shouldn't be able to use the best of those zillion other alternative FTP clients on your own home machine. And be honest: *most* of the PC users have to use one or at most two computers, so the way for them to customize the environment may be much more important than to you and to me, who have to deal with a mutitude of boxes sometimes. |
| Sun 16 Mar | Dimitri. | I bloody hate programs that are not customizable. Basically, I don't use them. Advanced options breaking the interface, that's a misunderstanding. Yes, a novice should not be bothered, I agree. But there should be somwhere there a menu item that sais 'preferences' or 'advanced preferences'. Make it hard to find, it doesn't matter. Keep it out of the way of normal users. It's power users that need it, the ones that now exactly what they want, and are prepared to read some instructions for it. So for them, it's ok to break the metaphor (how poetic...) because they don't need no stinkin' metaphor in the first place. They need just a tool that is as efficient as possible. Fortunately, some of the big software producers understood that. That's why you can modify the menu and the interface on Word ad nauseum, you can define your own keyboard shortcuts and so on. Some other didn't, which is why in Photoshop you get the colour balance with ctrl-b and ctrl-b only, and there is no way to have a keyboard shortcut for 'flatten image'. My two euro-cents. |
| writing coding tests at interviews | Sun 16 Mar | Simon |
| Gave a couple of interviews recently all had half hour coding tests, in C++ and Java.I am pretty okay withthem, asking algorithmic and programming questions, but sometimes I find they ask arcane language features, which you have to be a total expert to know.How do people design these tests? and how do they weigh the tests overall in giving job offers? |
| Sun 16 Mar | The Fake PC | > I find they ask arcane language features, > which you have to be a total expert to know... Maybe they are looking for a 'total expert'? Do you have some examples? |
| Sun 16 Mar | Simon | Well, something like why you can't pass a method in the parameter list of a method in Java( you could do it with func pointers in C++). |
| Sun 16 Mar | Mike Swaim | The problem with coding tests is that they test the specifics of what you remember, not what you know. Over the past year, I've done projects in C++, C, Delphi and C#, and debugged PowerBuilder code. There's a lot that I 'know' that I may not remember exactly. |
| Sun 16 Mar | bryan | Can you give more details about the format of the interview? Were you writing code responsively with an interviewer, or did they park you in a corner for a half hour with a computer? That said, the question you cite sounds completely appropriate. I would expect someone who has designed & implemented large systems in either Java or C++ to be able to discuss when you might want to pass a method to another method, and how you might be able to do that. Besides, even if the question was more esoteric, if you don't ask a candidate a question he or she can't answer, then you don't have a good feel for how much they know. I've sat through a ton of interviews (on the -ee side of the table) where the interviewer failed to ask any questions which would indicate whether my resume accurately reflected my knowledge and experience. I usually try to avoid working at such places, since they can't get lucky all the time. =) |
| Sun 16 Mar | Simon | I was writing code with pen and paper by myself.I know the method question is pretty legitimate, but are you supposed to get around 35-40 of these type of questions in 30 minutes? Besides there was no interactivity with the test, just straight marking of the stuff written out, at least in one case. A bit more interactivity would certainly have helped, as I could explain where I was coming from in the answers. |
| Sun 16 Mar | bryan | That does sound like a lot of questions. Do you know how it fit into the rest of their interview process? That is, are they using the test as a significant factor, or are they just getting a gauge for you rough skill level? I could sort of understand it as an alternative to those 'How do you rate your Java knowledge from 1-10' questions that I never know exactly how to answer. Either way, it does sound like a lot of pressure, in a rather unnatural situation. |
| Sun 16 Mar | Vincent Marquez | We use coding tests to 'screen' applicants. We don't really care if our lead java programmer knows how map works, or the internals of a a delegate, but if someone puts 4 years advanced perl and 2 years C#, they better know both of those. The best way to interview someone would probably be to go through code with them, and have them explain it. |
| Sun 16 Mar | one programmer's opinion | There are no pat answers. 'How do people design these tests?' Some employers purchase written tests, some employers 'roll their own' tests, and then there are some employers who place you in front of a PC and have you take tests that were created by a testing service such as TekChek. 'and how do they weigh the tests overall in giving job offers?' Depends on the type of employer you are interviewing with and the type of work you will be required to do. Most staffing/consulting firms place a lot of weight on coding and technology knowledge tests. While some non I.T. businesses (i.e. a large insurance company) may care more about your soft skills or business knowledge. |
| Sun 16 Mar | T. Norman | That probably wasn't the most well-designed test, but it's still probably better than the typical BS interview questions that reveal nothing about your abilities or experience, like 'what are your strengths and weaknesses?' and 'do you work well under pressure?' |
| Sun 16 Mar | Jimmy Chonga | I've seen a couple of these technical tests, and personally I find them to often be absurd. While it is important to understand that generally they aren't used to rate the selected prospects, but rather is just to filter out a gross lack of knowledge, they still can really goad a consumate professional. When I first started in the computer industry, I made it a personal mission to memorize every element of the language (at the time C), every standard library call, etc. As it progressed, soon I was remembering Windows API calls, then the MFC, then the ATL, etc. During this time I regularly used C, C++, Pascal (and the Borland Delphi variant Object Pascal), along with some scripting languages. There came a point, around the time that online help because speedy, that it just became ABSURD to try to continually memorize every aspect of programming. Now I quite honestly memorize very little: I hit the MSDN, Deja (er Google Groups), and other resources daily for things that I've done a million times, often because I'm jumping between a half dozen languages in an average day, using a huge swath of technologies. I don't chastize myself at all, though, as computer science has progressed to the point that it's a lot like the medical sciences: Ones job isn't to remember the contents of every book, but rather to have the analytical skills to call upon the experiences they do have to narrow down to the answer. In other words rating candidates by whether they know every parameter to printf off by heart is just silly, and is more prone to get you an idiot savant than a practical advanced programmer. |
| Automate Changes to MS Doc Properties | Sun 16 Mar | Baggaridim |
| My company went through a name change a while back, and we have thousands of .doc, .xls and .ppt that reflect the old name in the Document Properties (the tabbed dialog that appears when you select File... Properties from any MS Office doc). The data in the Summary tab is used by some search engines, and is often displayed in the search results. Not good for us, since this data is often incorrect. Anyone know of a method or tool to automate or speed-up the changing of these properties? E.g., I have a directory with 350 MS Word docs (Word 2000) -- how might I quicly change the company field on all of them from ABC Corp. to DEF Inc.? All files are in Office 2000 format, on Win2k. Thanks in advance for any suggestions. |
| Sun 16 Mar | yg | I suppose, these properties must be available through the office object model. So it should be possible to loop through a set of documents and update the values with a simple vbs or VBA script |
| Sun 16 Mar | Herbert Sitz | You might try doing something with this ActiveX utility, supplied by Microsoft: http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=224351 |
| Sun 16 Mar | Baggaridim | Thanks, those look like good suggestions. O if only we were dealing with an open, non-binary (preferably XML) format. |
| ASP/VBScript Question | Sat 15 Mar | Anon again |
| Are objects, declared and instantiated on an asp page, implicitly destroyed when the server finishes building the page or do I have to explicitly set them to nothing to tell the garbage collector that there are no more references to that object? For example, I declare and instantiate a connection and recordset object at the begining of the page. I then traverse the recordset in the middle of the page. At the end of the page, after the server is done parsing the file, are those objects stuck in memory because theres still a reference to them? |
| Sat 15 Mar | Li-fan Chen | They are automatically 'cleaned' up. Basically you don't have to worry about it anymore. But best practices dictates that you try to free them up. Because this clean up is supposely not perfect. With regards to database connections though. ADO and IIS cooperate to keep some of these connections open for a few moments more until inactivity (no more accesses on any asp pages) times out the connection. This is because establishing a connection is a heavy weight operation and results in unpleasant pauses to the user access experience. You'll have to look up some ASP books to figure out how exactly IIS and ADO do this. Would someone please correct me if I am wrong? |
| Sat 15 Mar | Damian | In theory they are cleaned up. In practice however, if you don't close and set to 'nothing' all of your database and connections you will find your server stops responding every few days and will need a reboot. |
| Sun 16 Mar | xasperated | Some hosts get upset if you don't clean up your objects after yourself. If you're developing stuff that others may host/use elsewhere it pays to be tidy with your objects if only to keep them out of trouble. |
| politics | Sat 15 Mar | The Real PC |
| I have noticed that certain groups, or people in certain occupations, are more likely to have certain types of political ideas. I have been observing this over the years. It also seems to correlate with how people dress. I think the underlying causes can be very complicated and I try to figure out what they might be. I was wondering if there are any typical political views connected with software developers. I thought that, maybe, working at a job where you have to solve complex problems and keep a lot of things in your mind could lead to more sophisticated ways of looking at complex problems in general. I have noticed that certain groups are more likely to have very simple answers to the current international problems, for example, and to be very self-righteous and opinionated. Anyone who disagrees with them must be unintelligent, ignorant or brain-washed by the media. I have always read a lot and thought about politics and I cant see any simple answers to the current problems. I wondered if any others here have a similar feeling. I realize that each individual, in any field, has their own unique opinions. Im just looking for statistical probabilities, and possible causes. |
| Sat 15 Mar | sgf | Of course many groups (professions/races/cultures) have general trends in their viewpoints. However in any group there are individuals who are different. Assuming any individual is like the group is the essence of prejudice. So I don't think anything good comes from focussing on the associations between group membership and political views, cultural practices, job performance or anything else. |
| Sat 15 Mar | The Real PC | I understand your point. On the other hand, it's impossible to understand human nature without acknowledging that prototypes exist. I know I'm not being politically correct when I talk about stereotypes, but I am motivated by curiosity, and if that conflicts with political correctness I don't care. |
| Sat 15 Mar | anon | There's been a few political dust-ups on the forum recently. What conclusions do you draw from those? |
| Sat 15 Mar | The Real PC | I must have missed them. I don't have time to read everything here, but I probably would have if I had seen titles related to politics or war. I would expect some people here to have strong simple opinions for or against the war. But I would also expect (hope) to see some thoughtful opinions. I also have a hypothesis that women, in general, are more likely to be against any war than men. So that would cause this forum, which seems mostly male, to be less strongly anti-war. On the other hand, men who dislike authority and powerful governments are likely to be against this potential war. These generalizations are based on my informal observations and are not backed up by any statistics. I'm not claiming my observations are 'true;' they are just observations. Since I'm interested in analyzing human nature, I can't help observing. As for political correctness, I completely disregard it in my quest for understanding. |
| Sat 15 Mar | Robin Debreuil | I think in a large part the generalizations come from which part of a problem you dwell on more, which is based on your location, job, politics, race, media etc. A lot is how personally threatened you and your group feels I think. I doubt most reasonable people would disagree with any of these very simplified facts: - GWB is an awful diplomat. A large part of the mess is because of this. - Saddam has plenty of chemical weapons hidden, and would use them given a chance. - The United Nations can not guarantee the security of anyone. They have a hard time doing anything concrete. So now, if you live in New York, or Kuwait for that matter, you are probably dwell on the chemical weapons. If you are a political person you probably dwell on liking/disliking Bush (or Chirac, whatever). If you think of yourself as an 'internationalist' you probably are willing to ignore the obvious shortcomings of the UN. Of course almost everyone is ignoring the real problem, which is nukes are easy these days, and what are we going to do about it. Those in the 'peace' camp dismiss it, those in the 'war' camp don't explain how this war will solve it, and those in the UN camp have their heads so far up their asses you can't tell what they are saying. So from an 'analytic programmer' point of view ; ), it seems the world has gotten bogged down on some trivial detail of the design spec, forgetting there is a looming deadline to meet - at our peril (happens a lot). The real problem to solve is: 1) Can the world prevent someone from letting off something big and nasty in a major city in the next 5, 10 or 50 years? (I really don't think so, but its worth a try). What has to happen to prevent this? if not: 2) When this does happen, say for the fourth time, and everyone gets on the same page, what will happen then? The problem will still be there, probably worse, right? Can we mentally treat that kind of thing like an earthquake or something? If the whole world was agreeing this had to be stopped, would it still be impossible? What does the recovery scenario look like? Hiroshima recovered in a few years, are wmd overrated? |
| Sat 15 Mar | Winston | Any software development which depends on the agreement of a large number of disparate groups will not get off the ground. The only successful developments I have witnessed have been created by a small team with a determined leader. Now we have got rid of the Euro backbiters GWB has such a team. |
| Sat 15 Mar | The Real PC | [Of course almost everyone is ignoring the real problem, which is nukes are easy these days, and what are we going to do about it.] Yes you're right, and have provided data in favor of my hypothesis -- software developers have experience in analyzing complex systems, and might be better at seeing through to the essence of the problem. Which you have done here, in my opinion. Nuclear weapons are the problem and no one on either side seems to be acknowledging it these days. The creativity and inventiveness of our species causes more trouble than outright evil. Every great discovery and insight can lead to more effective weapons. And there is nothing we can do about it because we are a creative animal, and we wouldn't give up our creativity even if that were possible. There will always be crazy people and there will always be anger and hate, so eventually whatever weapons exist will be used. I don't have an answer. I'm just tired of seeing everyone miss the main points. |
| Sat 15 Mar | runtime | I think the political stereotype of software developers is that they are either weepy Democrats or laissez-faire anarcho-libertarians. :-) |
| Sat 15 Mar | flamebait jr. | 'software developers have experience in analyzing complex systems, and might be better at seeing through to the essence of the problem. ' My experience is that software developers are also notorious for producing profoundly complex solutions to the problems they solve. I often hear about how other folks cannot see complexity, but maybe the ability to see it makes simplicity invisible to you. Based on some of the discussions I've seen on here and elsewhere it is also clear to me that many developers have very different goals that motivate their problem solving approaches. For instance, I hear frequent complaints about certain approaches being elegant, efficient, scalable, and what have you. This is fine as long as these things support product goals like make lots of money, or win a certain market segment, or achieve a certain level of product differentiation. That's what we get paid to do. The problem is that a lot of time the connection is tenuous and the developers complain when management tries to bring them in line. Perhaps the political views are similarly skewed by failure to perceive the true goals (which admittedly may themselves be counterproductive). Where do you even get good information to help you formulate your views on these things? I know I'm going to get flamed anyway, but please don't take any of this as an indictment of developers in general. I am one and I know it's a tough job, but I have seen enough of this kind of thing to make me want to take an opposing viewpoint a lot of the time. |
| Sat 15 Mar | . | I don't see any particular political characteristics of software developers. There are a range of sometimes conflicting views typical of educated people, of business people, of independent people, of employees, and so on. |
| Sat 15 Mar | Alberto | I think that part of our problem is perspective, we fear nukes because we used them ourselves. Maybe we are projecting our own ability for evil onto other races and cultures. Only one country in the world has ever used nuclear weapons with spite, at a time when the 2nd world war was well and truly over. And guess who that was - us. Would other cultures fear nukes as much as we do? Maybe thats why the Euros are less sabre rattling than us, they find nukes more abhorrent and believe the use of them to be more unlikely because of this. Also they live in a culture that has experienced much more war, with the ever present danger of enemies that live close by. All these things change your viewpoint. |
| Sat 15 Mar | Bored Bystander | I have found in my 20+ year career in engineering and software development that MOST (not all) career programmers - especially the classical 'lazy genius' type that is capable of great mental quickness and great productivity w/o breaking a sweat - are almost monotonously alike: - Libertarian and laissez-faire in general social outlook. - Very much into a Darwinist viewpoint that favors the gifted and quick. -Methodically unaware of even close by office politics. - Generally atheistic or agnostic. I've also found that the 'little boy king of the hill' intellectual bully/prima donna attitude is closely correlated with lack of experience of personal setbacks. So generally, you find more compassion and life wisdom in the ones that stay in the industry past,say, age 40. I think a lot of this stuff explains the general lack of interest by programmers in things like H1-B. The general attitude of the younger ones who havn't been bent over and raped by an employer (yet) appears to be that anyone seeking an equitable approach to offshoring or guest worker visas is a rascist, loser, or xenophobe. The attitude kind of goes with the cult of mental firepower that 'serious programmers' take up as their world view, that their brainpower makes them 'invincible'. |
| Sat 15 Mar | The Real PC | Bored, Your portrait of the stereotypical programmer is the kind of thing I have been noticing, about people in general. I keep seeing this kind of pattern. It's almost as if people don't have individual minds, as if we are somehow programmed to think in certain ways. It seems eerie sometimes. Your portrayal is actually not what I was thinking about when I posted the question. I haven't known all that many programmers, but your description does seem reasonable. I spent 4 years in an academic department, in a social science. All the professors in the department were atheists, every single one. And they all seemed to like affirmative action. But why? It almost seems like types of people are stamped out on an assembly line. I find it fascinating, and also a little weird. I often wonder if I myself fit into one of the patterns, hard as I try not to. Switching careers several times has helped. And I try to dress in ways that will confuse people. I'm definitely not the type you describe. I have questioned everything all my life, and then have questioned the questioning, so that now I almost seem conventional. |
| Sat 15 Mar | Bored Bystander | Hi Real PC, >> I keep seeing this kind of pattern. It's almost as if people don't have individual minds, as if we are somehow programmed to think in certain ways. It seems eerie sometimes. Unfortunately, I think 95% of the human race acts in a manner that is unconsciously intended to mimic the prevailing expectations of their peers. I think it's a behavior that is intended to reduce risk of rejection and increase chances of acceptance. Other examples: with (genuine) blue collar people, you get the 'lazy college boy that don't know nuthin'' working class hero diatribes, and the anti-management union mentalities. With agency technical recruiters you have the 'my Volvo/Inifiniti/BMW is better than your Lexus/Acura' money cult crap. And so forth. What I'm saying is that most people seem to be human 'state machines' simply out of a desire to conform to existing stereotypes so that they can be accepted. If anything, it's 10x worse today than it was 10 years ago. I think that in the current economic and political climate, *extreme* conformity is a perceived survival advantage. To reinforce what you're saying, I'd like to refer you to a terrific book, 'Class', by Paul Fussell, that is a humorous and yet serious examination of American social classes, their behavior, characteristics, attitudes, and mannerism. Fussell basically found out that most Americans are walking state machines back in the 80's and wrote about it. >> I spent 4 years in an academic department, in a social science. All the professors in the department were atheists, every single one. And they all seemed to like affirmative action. But why? It almost seems like types of people are stamped out on an assembly line. Given the reputation of college campuses, I'm not surprised. I think that what is really disappointing about the 'human state machine' premise, especially in the context of professors or preternaturally bright programmer types, is that really gifted people are as much walking carbon copies as are so called 'unthinking' blue collar types. >> I find it fascinating, and also a little weird. >> I'm definitely not the type you describe. I have questioned everything all my life, and then have questioned the questioning, so that now I almost seem conventional. Same here. Now, does that make you and I a new form of stereotype: 'ha ha, look at the introspective mature programmer types, they're so CUTE the way they try to be independent minded and contrarian... ' LOL. |
| Sun 16 Mar | MaisOui | Real PC said: 'All the social science professors in the department were atheists, every single one. ', adding that they were also all for affirmative action. That has a lot more to do with the person in charge of HR in social science, and the culture of the department than social science. For instance, the university I went to was fairly anti-affirmative action. As a result, the vast majority of the social science professors were also anti-affirmative action. I can't speak to the religious background of most of the professors, but one was a devout Hindu. There's nothing magic about social science afaik that makes a social scientist more likely to be an atheist. They are probably more likely to have a deep interest in people and society, and as a result more likely to have the background to draw conclusions about that topic, but that's about as far as you can safely go. Anyway, all that to say that I am not a big fan of drawing general 'truisms' based on one's own personal experience. For instance, I could say that most people restrict the circles in which they move to a very narrow chunk of society - and this is especially true for programmers :) This is certainly true in my experience, but to make assumptions about how other people see the world is very dangerous. Expanding this kind of assumption to someone you don't know opens the door to all kinds of potential problems and conflicts. It also gives you a false sense of security - when really, if your assumption turns out to be true, it's just a coincidence. Speaking of generalizations, the politics of the programmers I know tends to depend more on their background, education level and the sector in which they work. Since the group that I work with and the group I know are a fairly diversified group - it follows that their political beliefs should also be diversified (as in fact, they are). The beliefs range from the 'keep the status quo' to 'drop a nuke on Saddam'. Personally, I believe that a war with Iraq is not only a bad idea, it would be a morally corrupt venture with serious long-term repercussions for the US. It's likely to be ineffective: After all, the US bombed Afghanistan 'to get Bin Laden' with little success. They've also already (and illegally) done the anti-Iraq thing. It's not the main problem: Iraq and its potential cache of weapons is not nearly as dangerous as some of the other lunatics out there. And while nukes, biological and chemical weapons are very scary - terrorists are inventive (witness how they brought down the WTC). Historically, eliminating random threats as they occur hasn't exactly had a good track record. And we all know where arms races lead. Even if you accept the problem as being Saddam Hussein, it's not the logical solution: The main reason being given to support a war is that Saddam Hussein needs to be removed from power. The US has removed leaders they don't like before, without starting a war and without dropping bombs on civilians. So I really question the US motivation. |
| Sun 16 Mar | Robin Debreuil | The US bombed Afghanistan with little success? Could you clarify what you mean there? |
| Sun 16 Mar | Stephen Jones | -----'The US bombed Afghanistan with little success? Could you clarify what you mean there? '------ Quite right to attack his sloppy thinking Robin. America dropped a lot of bombs in Afghanistan and many of them went off, made a lot of rubble, and killed lots of turdworlders, which is what bombs are supposed to do. Also the TV ratings went up, and so did the government’s. This is called total success by any reasonable yardstick. Now maybe Mais Oui is one of these 'Eurowhiners' who actually thinks a 'successful' outcome might have marginally improved the lot of people in Afghanistan outside heavily subsidized, and still pisspoor, Kabul, or that 'liberating the Afghani people' involved something more than simply liberating a few thousand of them from their body parts with TNT therapy. Indeed he may even be under the impression that that was what the US government and allies were saying before the invasion - that and something about catching a guy called Bin Laden. This shows just how low down the evolutionary scale these cheese-eating surrender monkeys are. It was just guff; does anybody seriously believe that smoking Marlboro will make you look like a cool cowboy, or that MacDonald’s produces food, or Microsoft trusty computing? It's the same with the government - unlike the commy old-world governments the US has always embraced commercial values, particularly with regard to PR. The strike on Iraq will also be stunningly successful. Indeed the whole history of British involvement in Iraq shows the virtue of pre-emptive strikes. Iraq has never invaded the UK in 3,500 years of history, but in the last hundred years whenever a British PM has turned his gaze to the Middle East he has invaded Iraq (except in 1956 when they decided to invade Egypt instead). Britain 3 Iraq 0 QED Indeed the history of the US clearly proves the virtue of pre-emptive strikes. The US has bombed or invaded, or threatened to invade, pretty well every country in the UN (serves 'em right for joining such a pinko body) with the exception of Britain and Canada, who just happened to have got in first and been the only two countries ever to have actually invaded the USA. A double-whammy if ever there was one. There is only one thing that worries me; nearly all of Bush and Cheney's friends - Noriega in Panama, Saddam in Iraq, and Bin Laden in Afghanistan - have ended up having their countries. Considering how close Tony Blair is to Dubya, should us Brits be worried? |
| Sun 16 Mar | anon | When did Canada invade the US? |
| Sun 16 Mar | The Real PC | Bored, [really gifted people are as much walking carbon copies as are so called 'unthinking' blue collar types.] That is exactly what I've been noticing, and have been observing this for many years. I grew up in a 'liberal' family and all of us are above average in intelligence. I suspect my parents unconsciously contrasted themselves with lower class uneducated people. At the same time we supposedly believed that everyone is equal and racism is evil. We looked down on organized religion, because we associated it with lack of scientific education. When I became an adult I analyzed my parents' brand of 'liberalism' and eventually rejected most of it (although of course it contains some valuable idealism which I did not reject). But I think you're right -- my parents were looking for a sense of belonging and status that results from contrasting yourself with 'rednecks.' They didn't get their ideas from books -- they are not intellectuals and don't read a lot of non-fiction, aside from their central interests (my father is an engineer and I only remember him reading either engineering journals or novels). I have to say, out of guilt, that I love and respect my parents. I'm just describing a stereotype that I know well. In summary: I agree with you that fear of rejection and the need to belong to an 'in' group motivate a lot of this automatic thinking. I think there are other factors, though. A major factor is ignorance -- most people stop studying when they leave school, unless they have to learn something for their jobs. And even those of us who love to read and never want to stop learning have limited time, and therefore we are all relatively ignorant. And therefore a large part of all of our thinking is automatic. I'm going to read 'Class.' |
| Sun 16 Mar | The Real PC | Stephen, Do you read a lot of Chomsky, by any chance? |
| Sun 16 Mar | Stephen Jones | 1812 give or take a year or two. Stilll under Britain at the time. Burned down the White House. Don't they give it star billing in the history books over there? :) The war was the Napoleonic wars. Britain was at war with France, the US's oldest ally who had saved US independence in the War of Independence by moving troops in to attack Cornwallis and save Washington, who was holed up somewhere around the Potomac at the time. A bit embarassing those facts now (particulary owing your independence to part of the Axis of Weasel); still I'm sure Dubya's new allies form behind the old Iron Curtain can lend him a few unemployed experts in rewriting history. They're probably already polishing the Powerpoint Presentation that shows the Statue of Liberty was donated by EuroDisney. |
| Sun 16 Mar | Stephen Jones | ---'Stephen, Do you read a lot of Chomsky, by any chance? '----- The linguistics - none of the political stuff. |
| Sun 16 Mar | Robin Debreuil | Hey Stephen, Sorry to cause you such huffing and puffing. I think if you look at the requirements document for the afgan thing, they've all pretty much been met. Perhaps you should submit your blueprint for bringing Afganistan into this century, I'm sure all that is lacking is a plan. |
| Sun 16 Mar | Stephen Jones | Sure the requirements have been met. Lots of dead Afghans. Lots of news footage. Everbody in the US has forgotten about it. The Taliban are still controlling large swathes of the country. Hektmayer makes the Taliban sound like Mother Teresa. American troops are 'strategically withdrawing' from many areas of the country. Opium production is way up again (mixed news that). Bin Laden is still around. Al Quaeeda is still around. Each foreign intervention, whether British, Russian, American or Pakistani, has managed to leave the Afghanis worse off. Simply leaving them alone might be a good start. |
| Sun 16 Mar | The Real PC | Stephen, I more or less agree we (the US) should leave people alone. No one has elected us the police force of the planet. However leaving people alone is not the answer either, because we have no system of global law enforcement. That is the dilemma right now. Only the US is powerful enough to take on that role, but no one elected us. Even when our motivations are at least partially humane and compassionate, we look like a big bully. So the US should leave people alone, but then we need some other plan for global law enforcement, or the world will continue its collapse into chaos. The UN has not proven effective. Another problem that I see: When the US tries to help undeveloped nations we naturally impose our own definitions of 'success.' By 'helping' we destroy peoples' traditional social and economic structures, possibly resulting in resentment instead of gratitude. Maybe they want to herd goats and live in tents. We assume everyone wants Western education and technology, and equality for women. Those things are ok, but they aren't for everyone, and besides they bring along new problems. To summarize: The US can't win by intervening, but staying out of things won't work either. People should start looking at this tremendous problem more objectively. All I see everyone doing is blaming others and throwing around the word 'evil.' |
| Sun 16 Mar | Ajax | Why is global law enforcement a good thing? |
| Sun 16 Mar | Stephen Jones | The main reason that the UN doesn't work is that none of the five permanent members of the Security Council want it to. As to not all people wanting ' Western education and technology' but prefering to 'herd goats and live in tents' they are rarely offered the alternative. The American alternative to herding goats and living in tents is normally to have to abandon the goats and the houses to live in refugee camps. It is also well worth remembering that the US gives one of the smallest proportions of GNP in the world as foreign aid and that most of that goes to Israel (hardly an impoverished courntry) or Egypt, as military aid in both cases. The Americans have bombed or invaded something like 40 countries since the end of the Second World War, excluding those courntries where they intervened by proxy such as Chile where they arranged the murder of the head of the Armed forces for being loyal to the constitiion and then paid the lorry owners to go on strike to cripple the economy and the democratically elected government. In few of these cases has the American intervention been beneficial for the inhabitants of the courtries invaded, or indeed anybody else. I would say the only two examples that spring to mind are Bosnia and the first Gulf War and that has been marred by America's preference for a weakened Saddam Hussain and a crippled Iraq rather than self-determination for the different parts of Iraq. Exporting democracy, which has suddenly become the markieting formula for the Iraqui conquest is rather a joke. In general the Americans have been miuch better at undermining democracy whenever it produced a government they viewed as unfriendly, than in doiing anything to support it. Among its favoured allies have been the Shah of Iran, Ferdinand Marcos, and countless Latin American butchers (many of them trained at the School of the Americas). Do you seriously believe that the Americans have any interest in having democratic governments in the Middle East when the first thing all of them would do would be to break off all military co-operation with America? I don't doubt that the American public who applaud interventions and the troops that carry them out believe they are acting for the common good. I might even accept that the politicians who send them believe that on the odd occasion, but what is clear is that the intervention rarely achieives it; and when it fails it is not because 'people don't want our help' as so many Americans appear to delude themselves, but because the Americans have fouled up. Take Somalia where they come in to help and end up killing a few hundred Somalis and doing little else. Then they make a film of it and cast the Americans as the heros and the locals who suffered them as the villains. The Canadians and Italians didn't come out of it much better either. The average American does seem sometimes to be thiinking he is still living the the Second World War and its aftermath of the Marshall Plan. IPerhaps the best answer to that was given in the vice-presidential debate in 1988, when Dan Qayle compared himself to Truman and Kennedy: 'Son, I knew both Harry Truman and Jack Kennedy and you don't come anywhere near either of them.' |
| Sun 16 Mar | Chuck | Ajax, PC is right that global law enforcement is the answer. We need to give some organization ultimate unquestioned power over our lives. I am sure that they will use their power only for good and never evil because people are all basically good people it's society that's to blame when they go bad. |
| Sun 16 Mar | Dennis Atkins | 'It is also well worth remembering that the US gives one of the smallest proportions of GNP in the world as foreign aid and that most of that goes to Israel (hardly an impoverished courntry) or Egypt, as military aid in both cases.' -- S. Jones That's funny - I thought we gave more foreign aid than any other country by a wide margin. Do you have sources you can direct me to shouwing otherwise? You mention Israel. How much foreign aid did Sri Lanka supply to Israel last year? |
| Sun 16 Mar | The Real PC | [We need to give some organization ultimate unquestioned power over our lives.] That's ridiculous. We need a democratic world government that has the power to enforce it's laws. What we have now is international anarchy -- maybe that was ok before nuclear weapons. |
| Sun 16 Mar | The Real PC | He said in proportion to the GNP. We could give the largest sum and it could still be the smallest relative to our GNP. |
| Sun 16 Mar | The Real PC | Stephen, Speaking of stereotypes, you are right in line with the politics of typical high school teachers nowdays. You can't give the US a bit of credit for any of its accomplishments or good deeds. Of course our government was crazed in its effort to hold back communism. It could not distinguish between the twisted brand of communism practiced in the Soviet Union and democratic socialism. As a result we often supported cruel dictators just because they were opposed to communism. It was a semantic error, a result of the kind of extreme and simplistic thinking I see going on now, in a different context. |
| Sun 16 Mar | Nat Ersoz | Chuck was being sarcastic. |
| Sun 16 Mar | The Real PC | I know he was being sarcastic. I meant his being sarcastic was ridiculous, since there is no reason to think a world government would be a dictatorship. |
| Sun 16 Mar | Dennis | Why would you think a world government -wouldn't- be a dictatorship? Hasn't world government been the goal of every dictator and totalitarian regime? |
| Sun 16 Mar | The Real PC | The democratic western countries obviously don't want a world dictatorship. That's exactly what we're trying to prevent. |
| Sun 16 Mar | anon | yeah, we favor oligarchy! |
| Sun 16 Mar | realist | It's interesting how many Americans falsely think that the US is a philanthropic nation. It is 'national interest' that dictates US foreign policy. Were talking about business, not security, or lives, or justice, or helping the more unfortunate, we're talking cash baby, pure hard currency. It's also national interest that drives all foreign aid donations, America only gives when it receives in return, no philanthropy there I'm afraid. |
| Sun 16 Mar | anon | We haven't had hard currency in years. The US went off a metal standard in 1971 (I think). I don't think any currency circulating today is backed by anything but a promise. What we have is nice, soft fiat money. |
| Sun 16 Mar | realist | Your ignorance is amusing, 'hard' currency has nothing to do with metal. |
| Boomerang of offshore outsourcing? | Sat 15 Mar | T. Norman |
| I had a conversation recently with an Indian colleague who has had his green card for a few years. He is actually seriously thinking of selling his house and going back to India, partly because of the collapsing the US economy and the now-booming offshore programming sector in India. He was pointing out that: - Indian salaries are now more than double what they were 4-5 years ago, in real US dollar terms. - With the low cost of living in India, an experienced programmer can afford to live in a good-sized house with servants to cook, clean, and take care of the lawn. - Indian companies are very hesitant to lay people off, unlike US companies who lay off 1000 people if the wind direction changes. The more US and European companies outsource to countries like India, the more expensive and less productive it becomes as a whole. Increased offshore outsourcing sends up the price of those services, while decreasing the quality at the same time because they will eventually need to decrease hiring standards to keep up with the increasing demand for labor. The result could be either a lose-lose situation, where companies send out large amounts of work but dont profit from it because it isnt cheap enough to compensate for the delays and communication gaps involved, while American programmers are out of jobs at the same time. Or it could result in a mad swing back the other way, with companies realizing they got burned and pulling back loads of work into America, resulting in another hiring frenzy like in the late 90s. So, what are your thoughts? |
| Sat 15 Mar | Slava | This scenario is unlikely to be implemented:). 1) I highly doubt that good Eastern European programmers or Indian ones are worse than American ones. 2) I'm not sure about communication gap. These communication problems aren't so critical. I've seen a lot of good outsourced projects. 3) Had TV sets, videos, computers assembly jobs or steel jobs returned to US? No. And I highly doubt that this will happen in the near future. |
| Sat 15 Mar | T. Norman | By 'communication gap', I meant the gaps in time and interpretation that occur, as compared to someone on-site who has face-to-face interaction with users and managers. That gap is always going to be there, even if it is small sometimes. |
| Sat 15 Mar | GiorgioG | Does anyone know why our politicians are welcoming these offshore companies? http://www.buffalonews.com/editorial/20030308/1046850.asp Especially when they are using shady practices? http://www.businessweek.com/careers/content/mar2003/ca2003036_6655.htm *Sigh* -Giorgio Software Developer, soon to be street-cleaner |
| Sat 15 Mar | Stephen Jones | Indian companies are less keen to lay off staff because their staff are a lot cheaper. If the salary rates go up then things will change. Salaries are still a lot lower than the States or Western Europe. One of the advantages of outsourcing is that when the almost-inevitalbe cost overrun ocurrs it is nothing like as ruiniously expensive as it would be if you hired locally. You would probably get a clearer idea if you just forgot that the outsourcing went to another country. Imagine you're outsourcing to Minnesota instead of Mumbai. or Bimrningham Alabama instead of Banglalore. I think you'd agree that a balance would come into being; after all after a couple of years the guys in India are going to be more conversant with your product and company culture than newbies in Seattle or Santa Clara. Also remember that plenty of IT work cannot be outsourced because proximity to the client is an absolute necessity. I've spoken on this before. The limit to outsourcing in Inidia is most likely to be the creaky infrastructiure; in China there are 59 million internet users. In India there aren't that many telephone users, let alone PC users. |
| Sat 15 Mar | Robin Debreuil | Contrary to what you might think, the software industry doesn't exist to keep you employed. If you can't create the product people want at a competitive price, why would anyone feel obliged to buy it? What's good for you isn't neccesarily good for the country after all. If you assume that say half of the best programmers in the world (price/product) live outside the US - what should the US do about them? Option 1: Defend against them, let other countries hire them, and and watch those 'foreign' products beat you out of the market. Option 2: Hire them and an outsourced US product will beat you out of the market. Option 3: Bring them to the US and they will beat you out of the market with a pure US product. Obvoiusly they are trying three as hard as they can, settling for two, and laughing at most of the rest of the world doing one. There is a reason the US is the richest country in the world, despite seeming to get beat at every turn. And if you don't like it, you can move to India too - I moved to China and now live in a big house, have help, and can program all day. You are the one with the freedom to move, unlike most people here, so maybe its time quit whining about others having it better. |
| Sat 15 Mar | Yoav | Maybe the question to ask is, Why should ANY jobs remain in the United States when salaries are lower in other countries? |
| Sat 15 Mar | Devil's Advocate | While goods can (should?) be produced whereever is cheapest and then shipped, service industries need to be locally based. It is far cheaper to hire an American plumber (say) than to fly in his non-union Mexican counterpart. When IBM was running the computing industry show, writing software was seen as a service. If you wanted some software on your Big Iron, you called IBM and they sent a team to provide the service of writing it for you. One of the effects of the PC revolution was to commoditize (most) software. In the minds of most people in the U.S., software is a manufactured item -- something you get in a box with a UPC on it down at Staples or Best Buy or WalMart. As long as upper management believes this, programming jobs will follow the manufacturing jobs overseas. |
| Sat 15 Mar | T. Norman | I don't personally have a problem with the offshore outsourcing, if it actually results in increased profits and genuine cost savings. If that is what occurs, and I can't provide the price/performance to justify my US salary, then so be it. I will still benefit from cheaper goods and services and an improved stock portfolio, and there are other types of jobs that I can do to make decent money, even if it isn't quite as much as what I make now. The problem right now is that many companies are jumping into it as the latest management fad, thinking that they will magically save money just because the foreign salaries are lower. Just as in the '90s they all thought they would magically mint money if they put something on the Internet. They aren't carefully considering the types of projects that are good candidates for outsourcing, or the increased preparation and documentation involved in successfully completing projects offshore. Sometimes the companies won't even know when they're losing money as a result of outsourcing. For example, if an offshore project got completed with 10 people in 6 months, the American executive who sponsored the project will report to the directors and shareholders that it would have cost a quarter-million dollars more to do it in-house, because 10 American programmers for 6 months cost that much more (and of course, the exec gets a nice bonus for himself). But the reality could be that it would have taken just 5 in-house programmers 4 months to do the job, because of their familiarity with the company's products and systems and their direct interaction with users - in which case sending it offshore actually cost the company $100,000 dollars *more* in project costs AND two months of additional time to market. A result like that is a lose-lose situation where both the shareholders and employees end up worse off because the company isn't really saving money, and the employees' jobs are gone. (Of course, it's not lose-lose for the execs and CEOs who collect nice bonuses while this is going on). That is the situation I do have a problem with. In their enthusiasm to send more and more work offshore, some are failing to do the proper cost/benefit analysis to determine what and when and if to send work overseas. Some are even mandating that some arbitrary percentage of their systems must be outsourced. If they think it is an automagic money-making machine like they used to think of the dot-coms, the US economy will be in for an even bigger meltdown in a few years. |
| Sat 15 Mar | T. Norman | 'Maybe the question to ask is, Why should ANY jobs remain in the United States when salaries are lower in other countries?' Because programmer salaries are just one part of the equation. Once you outsource something, whether it is sent overseas or to a remotely located US firm, other factors come into play against you, such as one or more of the following: - A lower probability of producing exactly what the users want, as a result of the lack on-site interaction - Security concerns - Communication delays and time-zone issues (although the time zone thing can be a benefit in some cases) - Overall increased labor in terms of hours (such as the increased documentation requirements and the need for double-testing, i.e. the remote QA team will test it in addition the US client's QA team) - Lack of familiarity with the company's products, processes and systems - Differing interests: the US client's decision to send offshore is the prospect of saving money, while the offshore vendor's interest is to make money. This can result in ambiguous or 'gray area' requirements being interpreted in a way that favors the vendor ('Oh that's what you really meant? This is a fixed price project, we already developed what the contract said, it'll cost you $200K more to redo it in that way!') - No long-term stake in the maintainability of the systems they develop (unless the vendor also is signed to a multi-year maintenance/support contract) |
| Sat 15 Mar | | Maybe the question to ask is, Why should ANY jobs remain in the United States when salaries are lower in other countries? Not only is IT being outsourced but also backoffice work. I know of some big banks/brokerages sending there backoffice reconciliation and clearing overseas as well as there financial analysis and pricing. Also, telemarketing and call centers seem to be popular exports. |
| Sat 15 Mar | T. Norman | I meant to add to the point about the increased overall labor hours above -- that it may result in increased time to market, which may not always compensate for the direct cost of the labor itself being less. |
| Sat 15 Mar | Robin Debreuil | I'm curious if you view outsourcing to a domestic company, that isn't necessarily cheaper, the same way? A lot of these arguments were made as software spread out of Silicon Valley. Also, don't forget that these countries are markets as well as competition. The biggest opportunities are usually in a place with growth potential... |
| Sat 15 Mar | Bella | > - Indian companies are very hesitant to lay people off, unlike US companies who lay off 1000 people if the wind direction changes. Yes, and they also HIRED 10000 people when the wind changed directions. Why do you think you had a job the last 10 years? Ingrate. Live by the sword, die by the sword. |
| Sat 15 Mar | Bella | > Maybe the question to ask is, Why should ANY jobs remain in the United States when salaries are lower in other countries? How else would people pay for their new cars, housekeepers, and exotic vacations? |
| Sat 15 Mar | . | Managements have been revealing their inadequate understanding of software development for years, blaming their IT departments, their software developers, their anything. Anyone who thinks this offshore outsourcing gig is going to be some nice smooth ride is in for a big shock. It won't be long now before managements start kicking some blame again, and based on what I've seen of offshoring, there will be heaps. |
| Sat 15 Mar | Mark Hoffman | I agree with the original poster that Indian and other off-shore salaries are going to continue to be driven up. Good ol' suppy and demand. Unless you have a tyrannical government chaining techno-serfs to their keyboards, free markets will prevail. I've only had one experience with a project that had portions of it outsourced to India and the time-zone and communication differences made it quite difficult. I'm sure some projects lend themselves better to outsourcing. At either rate, there is an intrinsic cost in communcations when outsourcing. Combine that with increasing salaries overseas and I don't see outsourcing as the death of the American software industry. I do have to shake my head sometimes at my fellow American programmers who wring their hands at the prospect of losing their job overseas, but often fail to take even basic steps to make themselves more valuable. |
| Sat 15 Mar | GiorgioG | Well, just to satisfy my curiosity I did a job search for jobs in India. A VB/Oracle programmer with 3 years experience gets between $450-$550 per month. Offshore salaries may be going up, but they're going to have to go up a hell of a lot before they're up to our rates. As far as making yourself more valuable in the States, I don't see how in the long run there's any way to make a developer more valuable here than in some 3rd world country who has the same technical knowledge. Specialization may help, but there's little stopping a guy in India from doing the same thing. There's very few barrier sto entry in this field... |
| Sun 16 Mar | anon | Most of the stuff I've seen offshore is either low quality crap or heavy process, long duration. Compete by offering high quality and short lead times. Know your business, be able to talk to the people purchasing your services in their language. Most of all, DELIVER. Stop bullshi**ing your customers with buzzwords and other kinds of nonsense and bring some value to the table. Understand their problems better than they do. Make their lives easier. They will reward you. |
| Sun 16 Mar | Bella | > Most of the stuff I've seen offshore is either low quality crap or heavy process, long duration. Blanket statements like 'offshore is crap' makes you look like a stupid inexperienced ignorant flake. The sooner you accept that you're a commodity, the sooner you can start dealing with reality. |
| Sun 16 Mar | Bella | > Stop bullshi**ing your customers with buzzwords and other kinds of nonsense and bring some value to the table. Funny, its the american's who flounder in this bullshit. Offshore developers simple provide what the client desires. you're pathetic argument is nothing more than an endorsement for offshore, vs. self-interested american coders who think firms exist for the sole reason of providing people a place to make a living. |
| Sun 16 Mar | sincerely, anon | Would you rather I give a statistical analysis of each item I've seen produced that way? It's a general statement to be brief. Prepared to offer an analysis of your own, or do you just like to gripe and snipe? Get off your high horse. 'Funny, its the american's who flounder in this bullshit.' 'Offshore developers simple provide what the client desires.' So what, you have monopoly rights to blanket statements? And my argument *is* for americans to stop bitching and start producing if this supposed threat is bothering them. Read it again, this time with your eyes open and your brain engaged. |
| Sun 16 Mar | Stephen Jones | I suspect the Oracle/VBA programmer they will get in India for $550 will probably be pretty useless. I reckon the policy is hire half-a-dozen at the price and hope that one will be some good. Also VBA is small business stuff - you wouldn't dream of outsourcing an Access project to India because it's qucker to write the code than write the specifications (in fact Access is commonly used for writing speciifications). So I suspect he'll be used for internal work. It's the good guys on $2,000 a month you need to be worried about. Just to give you an idea of the competition at the bottom end, our college in Saudi (Indian or Saudi IT staff) has just send us an hour ago a list of 'community courses'. One of the things they are offering is a course for making small business applications using VB6 for the front end and Access for the BACK END. Methinks a certain misunderstanding of the correct tools here. However I did refrain from suggesting improvements to the course designer's back-end involving lubricants and metal tubing, if only because I am still puzzled as to why another course in 'Designing Static web pages with Front Page' should have knowledge of a scripting language as a preferred pre-requisite! It could be that both these cases are simply an example of the guy expressing himself badly, but this is precisely one of the problems that perennially comes up in the outsourcing debate. |
| Sun 16 Mar | Yoav | Lot's and lot's of talk about the quality of offshore-coded software .... Does anyone know of a product(s) in wide use -- good or bad, buggy or not -- that's sold by a US company though entirely coded offshore? |
| Sun 16 Mar | T. Norman | 'A VB/Oracle programmer with 3 years experience gets between $450-$550 per month. Offshore salaries may be going up, but they're going to have to go up a hell of a lot before they're up to our rates.' Remember that salaries are not the only factor. For example, companies spend millions of dollars a year for office real estate. The annual cost of the floor space, air conditioning/heating, electricity and other infrastructure related to the cubicle in which you sit is easily as much as 30% of your salary. If it wasn't beneficial to have programmers on-site, they would make all the programmers work from home and save those millions. By outsourcing development, corporations are giving up the benefits of on-site interaction, which is something important enough that they normally pay millions for it. At the same time, they are also paying for the real estate and infrastructure costs of the remote developers, which although cheaper than office space in a US city, it isn't as low as the 10-20% level that salaries are at. Rent in a software hub like Bangalore isn't so cheap, and it's rising rapidly. Also remember that unless the US company owns the Indian software firm, they'll be contracting the work out to the Indian firm, and the firm will put a markup on top of their salaries and infrastructure costs. As a result, the amounts charged to US firms are sometimes as high as $40/hour - not the 10% level that you'd get if you just look at programmer salaries. If Indian salaries go higher than about 1/3 of US salaries for the same skill level, very few offshore projects will be profitable. Salaries and commercial real estate there are going up while average skill levels are going down; it is much easier to get hired now in India than it was 3-4 years ago, and a study reported in an Indian newspaper actually projects India having a shortage of programmers within the next 3-5 years. Programming is not like manufacturing where there is a global supply of billions of people who are capable of being trained to do the job. Perhaps the long-term trend, after companies learn what really works and doesn't work, is that the projects that would have been outsourced to somewhere like EDS in Texas will instead be sent abroad (since if you have to deal with the remoteness and markups anyway you may as well do it cheaper), while what is done in-house will stay in-house. And the larger corporations will set up some of their own software centers offshore instead of using vendors. |
| Sun 16 Mar | T. Norman | 'Does anyone know of a product(s) in wide use -- good or bad, buggy or not -- that's sold by a US company though entirely coded offshore?' Oracle Developer 2000 was coded in India. What a buggy piece of junk. |
| Sun 16 Mar | . | The Visual J++ part of Microsoft's Visual Studio, back when Micosoft was supporting Java. VJ++ 6.0 was bad. |
| Sun 16 Mar | Robin Debreuil | Does anyone know a major product that wasn't at least partially outsourced? |
| Sun 16 Mar | Bella | Oracle Developer 2000 was the biggest piece of shit garbage I have EVER touched. Oracle lost ALL credibility in my eyes or ever having the NERVE of trying to foist that complete JUNK onto the software dev community. |
| Sun 16 Mar | T. Norman | There are still surprisingly many companies using Developer 2000. They got into it because they were using the Oracle database and they operated under the common management fallacy that it is better to have a single vendor for all or most of their IT products. They never would have bought it if it was from an independent company. Now they are locked in because they have so much code already built with it. I don't know who is worse -- Oracle for having the nerve to foist that junk on the industry, or the managers who decided to purchase it. |
| Sun 16 Mar | Stephen Jones | What's the worst in our case is the junk that they wrote with it! |
| Sun 16 Mar | Mark Hoffman | Bella, Anon's was clearly stating his experience with offshore development. He used clever phrases like 'most of the stuff I've seen'. How you saw that as a blanket statement is beyond me. You are the one looking ignorant here, Bella. Of course, I see you aren't above making blanket generalizations, though: 'self-interested american coders who think firms exist for the sole reason of providing people a place to make a living. ' And what in the world do you mean by 'self interested'? Do you mean someone that has the gall to want to protect their own job? Gasp! Get a rope! You claim that programmers are nothing more than a commodity. While I agree that some companies do treat people this way, I'd say this provides some insight into your past experience. Most true professionals with solid skills don't feel that way. Why? Because they've crossed the chasm of being a 'rank and file' coder to being someone that can offer more valuable skills than just coding up a VB 6.0 form. If you feel like you're just a commodity then try making yourself more valuable. |
| Sun 16 Mar | Slava | >>Does anyone know of a product(s) in wide use -- good or bad, buggy or not -- that's sold by a US company though entirely coded offshore? << CuteFTP, CuteFTP Pro. Coded in Russia. |
| Sun 16 Mar | anonymous | Wipro coded some Corel products, or part of them like parts of the Corel Office Suite |
| Sun 16 Mar | Dennis Atkins | There is no threat whatsoever of american IT jobs being lost to overseas. It's all hysteria bought into by insecure people who don't know any better: > [T]he fear that great numbers of tech and other white-collar jobs have been permanently transferred offshore is probably hysterical. 'As a cyclical phenomenon, jobs moving offshore isn't that important,' says Robert Shimer, an associate professor of economics at Princeton. The concern, says Kevin Hoover, an economist at the University of California at Davis, is based on the misapprehension that if our wages are high and other people's are low, all our jobs will be exported. 'It turns out we are more efficient than the people we are competing with,' he adds. see: http://www.business2.com/articles/mag/0,1640,47135%7C2,00.html That article also references credible salary and employment information showing that not only is unemployment in the US at historical lows right now, but salaries are going up and pries of goods going down, producing a massive surge in the quality of life. Those of you who in the Parade magazine thread though $45k was a good salary for a developer are totally out of touch with reality. If you are making less than $70k doing anything in IT you are probably a janittor, incompetant or too stupid to know your own worth. Here's the real salary info. these are nationwide averages too. If you live in a hotspot or are of above average talent, your salary will be even higher: http://www.business2.com/worth/0,,,00.html |
| Sun 16 Mar | Mike | How much or is any MS software coded overseas. I think it is not much. The 'evil' empire are actually better about keeping jobs here than some of it's bretheren, i.e. Oracle. |
| Sun 16 Mar | Mark Hoffman | 'That article also references credible salary and employment information showing that not only is unemployment in the US at historical lows right now' Um...there are some folks at the Department of Labor that might disagree with that. http://www.whitehouse.gov/fsbr/employment.html There is reason to believe that the unemployement rate is dipping, but it's hardly at 'historical lows'. And your comment that if you make less than 70K in the IT industry then you are 'incompetant, a janitor or too stupid to know your own worth' is laughable. Are you honestly suggesting that someone fresh out college is going to earn 70K a year? In all areas of the country? So the thousands and thousands of people in our industry that are looking for work and can't find anything paying even 50K a year..Are they just all stupid too? |
| Sun 16 Mar | Devil's Advocate | Dennis - I don't know if I would go so far as to call those cited salaries 'credible'. Firstly, their salary collection methodology is never properly explained (certainly not on the Methodology page). Secondly, if we combine their 'sample' salary data with some fairly recent census data ( http://www.census.gov/prod/2002pubs/p60-218.pdf ), we see that 149 of the 150 listed professions (including 'Executive Housekeeper', excluding 'Senior Retail Clerk') earn more annually than 50% of all full time working women in this country (or about 30% of all households). This strikes me as unlikely in any reasonable subset of professions from the economy at large. My suspicion is that these numbers are based on very few data points and / or were carefully chosen to reflect the biases of the core readership. |
| Sun 16 Mar | Deepak Shenoy | I live in India, and run a software business - an 'outsourcee' if you may. A few thoughts from this end:
a) Indian companies are less keen to lay off staff: Yes, sometimes to some obscure degree of fanatism. I don't know if it's leftover socialism from the past, our archaic labor laws, or just the fact that we have absolutely no social security. But managers aren't too keen to fire staff for non-performance or incompetance, let alone lay offs. Social issues play a part too - there are tons of languages spoken in India, and nepotism among common-language-speaking-people is...well...common. (I personally can't stand it, for the record) 'Taking care of their own' is like a mission statement in some places.
b) Salary increases - While IT salaries have been going up, the last two years have been much lesser in terms of growth. From an industry average raise of 50% annually, we're down to something like 10%. Also, it's taking a while for other industries (manufacturing, banking, retail etc.) to catch up with the salaries - so the standard of living for an IT person is very high. But even now, the highest payers are not 'outsourcee' companies - that credit goes to the offices of fully owned foreign companies (e.g. GE, Oracle, IBM)
c) Outsourcing quality,differing benefits and the fact that US companies are not evaluating cost/benefits enough:
True, a company could twist glazy specs in fixed bid projects, but they won't get their biggest source of customers - references. Plus it'll teach both parties to keep the requirements VERY well specified - I've been burnt by partial specs on fixed bid projects, where I've had to do a lot more than what I believed was promised.
In terms of quality - it's probably true that some companies have hired by the dozen without too much emphasis on skills, and maybe because the salaries are so low, but in the long run these companies are either going to die, going to fire the incompetent people, or the people might make themselves valuable. What's happening right now is perhaps best for the Indian industry - that the outsourcers are concentrating more on quality, so companies here have to address that or die.
If American companies aren't addressing cost/benefits enough, then they'll learn after they get their fingers burnt. My company stands to lose if a client decides purely on price - I offer intangible things like communication skills, and higher quality which costs me higher (and so I can't offer the lowest price). In fact we stand to lose if a customer does no cost benefit analysis even if we get the project, because expectations are way too high. There are enough hurdles in just the time zone issues to warrant serious problems, and one has to understand that this will happen in an outsourcing scenario.
d) A point on salaries - while in the US and Europe salaries are the highest % spend of a company, out here (in my company at least) we spend between 40-60% on infrastructure and other costs (Internet, admin etc.) So if a company has spent tons on infrastructure they hire like crazy even if there's no current use for the people - because, or so they say, the investment does them no good otherwise. (I don't subscribe, but that's a different story). That might explain why a number of large companies have more than 20% of staff 'on the bench'. (Yes, there is such a thing as a resource buffer, but 20%????)
That might explain excessive hiring but again, as the competition with other countries (China, Russia etc.) heats up, these companies will have to shed all their flab, and start moving faster. In fact, some of the companies here are also planning offshore outsourcing to China and Phillipines!
e) Products built offshore - there's a couple of companies I know that are developing famous products - iFlex, Citibank's banking software arm is one of the biggest players in the banking industry - that's developed in India. There's a CRM product called 'Talisma' that's done here too. Most of the rest I know are heavily vertical. Mass market apps usually take a lot more cash in terms of marketing, support etc. which might be the reason they're not done here (or if they are, the partners abroad might be branding them)
One other reason for outsourcing has been the work itself - maintenance on large projects is very important for companies, but their best staff wants nothing to do with them. Maybe because they're boring or offer no space for growth and learning etc. Such maintenance work has, in my experience, benefited from outsourcing - a maintenance company can focus on maintenance itself.
Just my 2 |
| Sun 16 Mar | Stephen Jones | Deepak, A fabulous analysis. One thing you mentioned is the cost of infrastructure. Presuming computers are the same price in India they are in Sri Lanka we will be talking of a 30-50% premium compared to the States, and possibly more for business buyers. To the best of my knowledge the only broadband in either courntry are leased lines at mid or early nineties US prices, and phone charges for dial up are around $1 an hour in Inida I believe (in Lanka they go up to $3 an hour at peak times). I also suspect you either have to provide your own generators or rent in a fairly limited area of the centre of the city as although most of both courntires are electrified outages are common (the lLankan government has allowed the import of oil so we no longer have the scheduled cuts for drought, but I still find there is at least one day a week the power is off for some reason). Perhaps you could tell us where you are and what the office rents are. I remember seeing that Mumbai office rents were 80% of downtown New York (which was incidentally a lot cheaper than London, and even Birmingham England). In the States there is not as steep a difference in land prices as there is in Lanka, where a perch (25 square metres) of building land in Colombo can cost as much as $8,000 to buy, whilst only 30 kilometres away the price goes down to $300 or lower. |
| Sun 16 Mar | T. Norman | 'Maybe the question to ask is, Why should ANY jobs remain in the United States when salaries are lower in other countries?' I'm going to twist your question around and ask 'If offshore programmers can offer the same quality and efficiency* as in-house American or European programmers, why would they continue to accept a significantly lower salary?' *efficiency being net of the problems associated with remoteness, such as communication issues and time delays, etc. |
| Sun 16 Mar | Dennis | But Mark, someone fresh out of college is probably the first and the third. Not to say that can't change with experience. |
| Sun 16 Mar | Dennis | 'carefully chosen to reflect the biases of the core readership' Devil's Advocate, I don't know, it's Business Week. It's for managers and executives right? Wouldn't their bias be to hear that there is a surplus of low priced engineers, desperate people willing to accept any job just to have a job in the supposed high unemployment, outsourcing is good, etc? Instead they are saying companies will be increasing wages this year, engineers make a good wage, outsourcing is pointless since americans are THAT much more productive, and unemployment is at historical lows. What purpose would these things serve to Business Week's readership of executives? |
| Sun 16 Mar | Stephen Jones | Dennis, The positions chosen are those which the readers of the magazine are likely to hold. You don't see janitor's salaries because janitors don't buy the magazine (they probably can't afford to). And I don't exacltly know what a 'help desk analyst' is biut at $61,000 you can get out the L1 or whatever (or better still pay me $40,000 and outsource me to South India or Sri Lanka!) |
| Sun 16 Mar | Dennis Atkins | Mark, I followed your link to the white house and went to see the graph at: http://data.bls.gov/servlet/SurveyOutputServlet?request_action=wh&graph_name=LN_cpsbref3/ and was greeted with: >500 Internal Server Error >SurveyOutputServlet: >java.lang.NullPointerException Which reminded me of the thread a couple weeks back on exceptions -- this is exactly the problem! Low quality unstable code! |
| Sun 16 Mar | Dennis Atkins | Stephen, Many janitors in the US make much more than you are asking. Janitorial work is often unionized. $70k is not uncommen, nor is $120k for a dock worker. |
| Sun 16 Mar | Devil's Advocate | Dennis - I don't know where you are getting your numbers, but according to salary.com's salary wizard (for what it's worth) 75% of 'Senior Janitors (3-5 years janitorial experience)' living in NYC or San Jose, CA (the highest cost-of-living metro areas I could think of) earn less than $33,000/year. While there are certainly some janitors in the US who earn more than that. As to your other point, I am not familiar with Business 2.0 and cannot speak of it specifically (but I think it is a different entity than Business Week). There are any number of reasons a (less prestigious?) subscription magazine might want to report extra rosy news. It makes the subscribers happy, and higher circulation is good for the magazine. I take issue with their study because the methodology is secret, hence the conclusions are irreproducable. Additionally, the numbers they have reported do not agree well with what I have seen either in my area (greater NY metro) or in other publications (census documents linked previously), which convinces me not to give them the benefit of the doubt. |
| Sun 16 Mar | Devil's Advocate | Should be 'While there are certainly some janitors in the US who earn more than that, I don't think $70K can reasonably be considered 'common'' |
| Sun 16 Mar | Dennis | Ack! You're right; I don't know why I thought it was Business Week, it does seem to instead be some sort of self-serving tech-worker rag, and you're also right that without the methodology reported in a way to make it replicable, the 'study' is worthless. Back to our cages everyone! |
| Tracking metrics with FogBUGZ | Sat 15 Mar | Guy Gervais |
| Since FogBUGZ uses an SQL backend to keep its data, cant someone who wishes to track bugs-by-programmer simply connect to the DB and create his own report using any reporting tool? Or is the DB obfuscated and encrypted to prevent exactly that? |
| Sat 15 Mar | Joel Spolsky | No, they can do that... it's pretty easy: off the shelf Microsoft Access, and we even have documentation explaining how to make your own reports. They're just not built in, one-click, which discourages non technical managers from messing around with things they don't understand :) |
| Sun 16 Mar | Gwyn | I think this is a great piece of marketing from Joel! He doesn't want to expend the cost and effort to allow customisation of FogBugz in terms of lifecycles, attributes, reports but he cleverly advertises this as an additional benefit! However, I don't buy it. However well intentioned, telling people that they don't really want what they're asking for simply comes across as arrogance to a number of people. And we don't like arrogant suppliers, oh no! Provide the tool, make it customisable, try to deter people from customising it by education and by providing a good process model set up in the tool in the first place (a lot of tool suppliers give you a flexible tool but don't give you a good initial setup - probably because they understand the tool but not the process it fits into) |
| Is FogBuz really required ? | Sat 15 Mar | Sunish |
| I just happened to see and use a simple bug tracking software Bugtrack 1.3 from http://www.pacsoftware.com.au/ . The download and install is quite simple as its a simple desktop app with no heavy db or web interface. For a small shop of just 2 developers I think its great for its price(its free). Anybodys got any experience with it ? I mean long term issues. Are there similar better alternatives ? |
| Sat 15 Mar | Bella | MS-Excel is fine for many projects as well. An MS-Access database built in 20 mins (One table, one screen, and a few reports) is also more than enough for many projects. |
| Sat 15 Mar | Sunish | You can have a reasonably good UI and all the features mentioned even with less than 20 minutes, just a matter of download. |
| Sun 16 Mar | murph | This is a 'how long is a piece of string' question. Step by step: 1) Is a tracking tool need at all? I think the balance of opinion here is yes. 2) So just use excel (or similar)? Well you if it works in your context that's fine but what if it doesn't... Which bring us to the answer (more or less) in that its not so much a question of whether FogBugz is really required as whether the cost incurred to acquire the particular set of facilities and features provided by fogbugz represents good value (to you and your organisation). Personally I think that technically and philosophically FogBugz is excellent and that it is good value for money (ask a) how long would it take one to provide an adequate home-brewed solution, and then b) multiply that by your hourly rate...). Naturally it won't be a good fit for everyone, nor will all users want to use all the features which brings us back to the value question. |
| Sun 16 Mar | Martin | I had te same questions as Sunish. So decided to test FogBUGZ - you can get a free 45 day trial account, just visit http://try.fogbugz.com/ . Of course you can use Excel (or whatever tabular data storing and presentation tool you prefer). But then you will suddenly have to do your daily work AND develop, tweak, update, etc. a new utility. The time you save by using a home brewed bug tracking tool might well end up being used on maintaining your bug tracking tool - and time is money. |
| Any experience with post-test analysis? | Fri 14 Mar | Post-Mortem Pete |
| My team has just wrapped up a complex web-app (Servlets/JSP/XML/HTML) for processing new insurance policies online with a specific carrier. Ive got the task of rounding up the root cause for our 400+ closed bugs. The main goal is to devise a mitigation strategy based on the source of most bugs. Mgt. is behind this exercise because a cursory glance at most bugs reveals a change in spec or client desires/goals. Basically, the client is wondering: Did we really collectively change our minds 400 times? or did these guys botch a lot of code? My first swing is to get the team to answer the question Why does this bug exist? (change in spec, immature code, new requirement) and hopefully some buckets will emerge. Also, weve already identified where the bugs occurred to show some hot spots. Any experience with this type of exercise, comments, questions or suggestions would be appreciated and promptly answered. |
| Fri 14 Mar | Li-fan Chen | The date the bug was reported is import.. so is the check in time of the code that caused the bug. When was the first date it was checked it, when was the day it was fixed (after the bug was identified). I know.. usually you check in at the end of the day or the end of the week so you get a lot of bugs solved at a time. So that's a revision control usage issue. But assuming you have concurrent access prevention and you check things back in pretty frequently you should have a good idea when new features requested that day by a client was the cause of a bug. When you correlate the two (bug count and bug id with the check-in date of the program code) you can quickly tell whether client request was introducing bugs on an on-going basis or 'all at once' as you put it. -- David |
| Fri 14 Mar | Joel Spolsky | I'm not at all surprised if most 'bugs' are really feature requests because the client changed their mind; this is natural. Software is exploration; you don't know where you're going until you get there, and you find a million reasons to adjust the path a little bit on the way. See The Iceberg Secret: The Client Doesn't Know What They Want. Stop Expecting The Client to Know What They Want. Anyway, post mortems are fine if you use them to learn how to make better estimates in the future. Next time you'll know that in a project of size X, the number of small course corrections you need to make is Y ... |
| Fri 14 Mar | ODN | The hot spots you have identified are great starting points for your investigation. One of the rules from 'The Art of Software Testing' states that 'The probability of the existence of more errors in a section of a program is proportional to the number of errors already found in that section.' As you suspect, there is a good probability of correlation between low-level errors and higher-level requirements 'errors'. To quote from 'The Art of Software Testing' again (which is quoting from I.M. Copi's 'Introduction to Logic'), 'A problem may be characterized as a fact or group of facts for which we have no acceptable explanation, which seem unusual, or which fail to fit in with our expectations or preconceptions. It should be obvious that -some- prior beliefs are required if anything is to appear problematic. If there are no expectations, there can be no surprises.' So bugs can be 'created' in some cases just by changing expectations, as you noted. It might be helpful to take a top-down approach in addition to the bottom-up approach of 'Why does this bug exist?' and see if you can meet in the middle. In other words, start with a list of requirements, and try to identify higher-level course corrections, and then think through the low-level impact of these. If you don't have this kind of higher-level track record, you can most likely recreate it using the 'Why does this bug exist?' approach, but if you have a higher-level audit trail, it should help you focus your efforts more. In a sense, you are trying to recreate the results of regression testing the user acceptance tests, if such a thing were possible. :-) |
| Fri 14 Mar | Post-Mortem Pete | Thanks for your replies, so far so good. ODN: It sounds like requirements traceability and change control tracking is your way to start at a higher level. Correct? Also my brain almost deadlocked on this one: 'In a sense, you are trying to recreate the results of regression testing the user acceptance tests, if such a thing were possible.' ..but I see your point. Joel: It sounds like your mitigation strategy is to know that revision is natural and will happen, but accurately estimate to what degree based on the size of the proj. Makes perfect sense to me. But let's say mgt. is hoping for some process tweaks on our side that help us reduce the late-in-the-game 'discoveries', are there any on the top of your brain? Should I just read a book on XProgramming and get it over with? ;) Thanks, Pete |
| Fri 14 Mar | Big B | No experience as far as the original question, but in response to how to avoid discoveries late in the development process... I usually write both a specificaiton, and, when I think I'm done, I write a schedule, consisting of a list of things I need to do to meet the spec. As I'm writing the schedule, I always realize that there are things in the spec that won't work. Extrapolating from that experience, anything that causes you to think differently about the problem will help. Specs, schedules, mock up screens, user stories, drawings, presentations... |
| Sun 16 Mar | Stephen Jones | Wouldn't a better use of the iceberg metaphor be 'The client does know what he wants, but nine-tenths of it is below the surface'? |
| Adobe UI - really bad, or is it just me? | Fri 14 Mar | Kyralessa |
| Ive been working with trial versions of Adobe FrameMaker and InDesign, trying to find something to do a medical conference brochure and other stuff with. (My university gets major Adobe discounts.) I played with FrameMaker for about twenty minutes before deciding it wouldnt work. Ive been fooling with InDesign for a few hours, and while its more powerful, it has many of the same shortcomings. Why is the user interface so bad? A lot of stuff is done through what Ill call tool windows, which can be called up through the Window menu (hardly an intuitive choice in my opinion). Some of these tool windows can be resized, and some cant. Some can be combined as tabs in the same window, though it takes several drags to hit exactly the right pixel to combine them; and sometimes they combine in the same tab row, while sometimes they stubbornly appear above or below another group in the same window. Since only some can be resized, theres no point to sticking them all in one tabbed window anyway; click on a non-resizable window and it shrinks down to an inch across, and all the tabs are crammed together where you cant read what they say. Ideally Id have all this stuff in ONE big window, autohidden against the right edge of the screen, instead of in more than twenty individual windows all floating around my screen. Dragging this crap out of the way of what Im doing is a phenomenal waste of my time. None of the windows and toolbars seem to be able to dock anywhere; they just float around here and there all the time. Has anyone else noticed all this? Do all page layout/graphic design programs have UIs this bad? (I havent seen any reviews that emphasize these problems.) I did last years brochure with Word, and painful as that was, this seems twice as irritating and counterintuitive. Other opinions? |
| Fri 14 Mar | anon | I used to feel the same way about Dreamweaver. As a once-in-a-while user the multitude of windows were a real trial. I imagine, though, that if you make a living using the tool so that jumping around the windows is second nature, it probably isn't so bad. I wouldn't mind having hotkeys for everything myself... |
| Fri 14 Mar | mark | I've never worked with those products, but I've been using Illustrator and Photoshop for years, and the UI you describe is the same in those programs as well. I like it, and find that it's easy to use after learning for a few days Since their entire line is designed that way, once you learn one, you can find your way around the others in minutes. And as far as the windows being in the way, remember that most designers use larger monitors. My design machine is a Mac with dual 21' monitors. I'm not saying there isn't a better way, but for legions of graphic professionals, this works. |
| Fri 14 Mar | Li-fan Chen | You are probably not wrong. But do try it for a little while, most people stop complaining after dealing with it 24/7/365 for years. One or two really angry users had tried storming the Adobe Head Quarter and were all promptly shot. |
| Fri 14 Mar | Wei | hmmm. i use photoshop alot and yeah it exhibits some of the behaviour you mentioned. as a graphic designer i know most if not all the shortcuts, and whatever palettes i need, so i'd say it's a pretty alrite ui. the thing about adobe (as previously mentioned) is that all of their software products exhibit similar behavior. =) |
| Fri 14 Mar | Nat Ersoz | I've abandonned all GUI documentation tools, including Word. Pretty much, I'm down to text files now. Kind of ridiculous, I will admit, but... 1. Using Word like tools takes too long. I try to keep the docs up to date, and WYSIWYG tools take too long to use. This actually discourages accurate documentation since the tools are so cumbersome. 2. Its impossible to grep through the document when stored in binary formats. 3. The anti-intuitive nature of Word like tools finally forced the issue. One of my biggest gripes is that I wanted uniformity across documents by using a common template. Change the tempplate formats and the docs based on the template should automatically change. Never worked. Very little of the expected results of documents nesting documents ever worked properly. In fact very little ever worked as expected so text and some HTML became my norm. Screw it. If they cannot read text, it sucks to be them. |
| Fri 14 Mar | HeyCoolAid! | Anon said: 'I wouldn't mind having hotkeys for everything myself... ' Alas, there ARE hot keys for everything. I find TAB to be a particularly useful one, as it will show/hide all tool bars and windows. I usually work in Adobe products with everything hidden, using the hot keys to switch between tools/settings. A simple tap on the TAB key will reveal all when I need something else. |
| Fri 14 Mar | rexguo | This phenomenon is mentioned in one of Joel's older articles, that the 'UI-sucks' issue is irrelevant when it is the type of application that its users are expected to use it very often. What's more important in such apps is maintaining consistencies while adding features in version upgrades. This is a mainly coders forum, and you complain about a graphical app's UI, so how about complaining about IDE's UIs too? The UI problem is really the learning curve. If someone invents a way for a new user to learn a UI without reading a manual or hitting the help key, i.e. within the app, then he/she will make lots of money. |
| Fri 14 Mar | Robin Debreuil | Don't tell that to macormedia, they got sued (and lost) for emulating those very things. I use those products and similar ones all the time. One thing to remember about that type of product is that there is a wide swath of very different tasks done in each product. So in say photoshop, an icon maker will have a totally different setup than a person working in print. You don't want long lists or customizable dialogs, as most users only use about 15% of the features for any given task. But - the 15% that you do use are so used that having them anywhere but front and center is a non starter. Second thing, as was pointed out, most graphics people have at least large monitors, usually dual. That really helps. Actually I think the programming IDE's and office apps could learn from graphics in certain areas - there just hasn't been as much pressure for easy access and customization in these categories, so they haven't worked as hard on it... |
| Fri 14 Mar | Rahoul Baruah | Don't forget that Adobe is a Mac company, and they do things differently over there. Not better, not worse, just differently. I think Joel did an article on it once. |
| Fri 14 Mar | Kyralessa | Actually, rexguo, the forum is for 'open discussion of topics raised on Joel on Software', so UI qualifies, whether or not it's in a coding-oriented product. But I will concede that (a) I'm not a professional graphic designer, (b) my monitor is only about 17', and (c) this is probably not the proper tool for me. It appears to be of far more use to people who are going to be using it for most of the day every day, and who are willing to spend time mastering it, than for people who want to create something just every now and then. But that said, apparently the fact that professional graphic designers have big and multiple monitors and spend time learning the key shortcuts is what lets Adobe get away with such a sloppy user interface; contrast it with something like Acrobat, which is more likely to be used less frequently and on one smaller monitor, and which has a much cleaner UI. |
| Fri 14 Mar | BW | Hold on, there. Adobe Acrobat has a better UI than Photoshop or Indesign? Setting aside the fact that these programs all have entirely different purposes, the main difference is that Acrobat buries most of its functions and preferences in obscure corners of the menus under non-intuitive names. The eight to twelve most-used functions (zoom, select, etc.) are in a toolbar at the top, obfuscated by tiny, baffling icons. This has the advantage of leaving the maximum possible screen area for viewing documents (which is the main idea of Acrobat), but navigating the document can be very difficult. Most of my clients have needed to be told that the little magnifying glass means zoom and the little binoculars mean search. Ye Olde Photoshoppe and Indesign do call for a completely different UI, one that may not be intuitive at first, but one that can be customized enough to make the user more efficient. They are professional tools, after all. While I agree that some aspects of managing the palettes are more obscure than they should be, the small investment of effort into learning how pays big dividends in efficiency over the years. And, of course, the knowledge transfers to other Adobe products. If I walked into a machine shop, I wouldn't have the vaguest idea how to operate all the knobs and buttons on an electronically controlled lathe. But after a bit of time spent learning the controls, the professional operator will be able to use the tool with maximum efficiency. |
| Fri 14 Mar | Robin Debreuil | Have you looked at the price of those products? Pretty hard to justify for the occasional user that wants to print a newsletter... Visual Studio is pretty confusing to the new user that want to put the occasional javascript in html, but I would say that is a mistake either. |
| Sat 15 Mar | | Personally, I find most Adobe products very hard to use and I need to use them on an on-going basis (that's what clients use). So I don't buy the 'user can learn interface and then will like it' argument. (Similar to this forum, I use the product in spite of, and not because of the limitations of the user interface). It has nothing to do with monitor size - I have two large monitors. I also don't think it has anything to do with the assumptions coming from the Mac World (although I do mainly use a PC), because I've seen Mac users struggle with the same things that drive me crazy about it. Aside from all of the little windows that you can't dock and don't dock/undock automatically - it's hard to find things in the menus, which are incredibly badly laid out, and as someone else mentioned - poorly named. As a consequence of this, to use any Adobe product requires a great deal of clicking to get anything done. There's a high learning curve to use the products, and especially to do more than the bare basics. And while to some extent the attitude 'oh well, [graphic design] is complicated' is justified, that doesn't mean that actually using the program on a day-to-day process should be so hard. On a 'we can choose how to accomplish this' basis, we eventually switched to Paint Shop Pro from Photoshop (which aside from being easier to use, is also a heck of a lot cheaper), and to Word from Illustrator. I'm sure all the Illustrator users in this forum will give me heck, but with the exception of dealing with printers (requires some file format creativity), the result has been faster turnaround and superior quality of work. And recently, we had a client whose normal shop couldn't handle a task in Illustrator (said it was 'impossible'), which we were able to accomplish with no problems. And Word is not really designed for this kind of work! What's wrong with this picture? The problem with the vast majority of Adobe product is not just that the program is complex. We also use TrueSpace (basically a 3D animation tool) which is for a highly complex task, and the interface is certainly daunting at the beginning if you know nothing about animation (only about a million coloured icons across several menu bars), but once you learn about animation (and the relating terminology), and learn how the user interface is put together, actually using the program is pretty easy. To be honest, I think the poor UIs are a mix of sloppiness on Adobe's part, which they can get away with because they have such a big market share, and legacy code from umpteen versions and platforms. They do fix things - but as an example, how long did the text selection tool in Adobe Acrobat select text along a single line, even if it was formatted in columns? Answer: several major releases, which is way too long. And did anyone have the misfortune to actually use the 'forms' feature (also in Acrobat) a version or two ago (to be fair, this is much improved, but it still sucks to use). I'm picking on Acrobat because it's the product I had to use yesterday and I'm still steaming with frustration after the experience. |
| Sat 15 Mar | Going back to bed. | Brain a little behind fingers today. Obviously, I meant Page Maker and not Illustrator. |
| Sat 15 Mar | Stephen Jones | I've read in various places that Adobe is one of the 'we know much better than the luser' companies. It can get away with an atrocious interface firstly because of the other things it does better than anybody else, and secondly because so many people have been forced to use it that it has become the norm, so even programs such as Corel's Photo Paint copy the basic design. The best user interface I've seen was MS Photodraw, but because it was different from the Photoshop way of doing things it never took off (being buggy didn't help either - it was the source of my favourite MSKB bug, 'MS Photo Draw won't start if an odd number of fonts are installed on the machine'. Now from what I've heard Photoshop is positively user-friendly compared to Quark Express. |
| Sat 15 Mar | runtime | As a Windows user, I can't stand the Photoshop-style apps that have tons of tiny, floating toolbars. I like my windows maximized. I don't wany my windows or toolbars moving around or inefficiently wasting pixels by letting the desktop show through.. I think Adobe apps use tiny, floating toolbars because that is the Mac style. My girlfriend is a graphic designer and (inevitably) owns a Mac. When I use her computer, I have great difficulty juggling many apps and windows because they don't show up in the Dock. |
| Sat 15 Mar | runtime | Also, is there a Mac hotkey equivalent of Windows' ALT+TAB (to cycle between apps) and CTRL+TAB (to cycle between MDI windows within a single app)?? |
| Sat 15 Mar | Dennis Atkins | It's CMD-TAB on the Mac to switch apps. OS support for switching windows is in OSX but not 9, its OPT-F? or CTRL-F? -- forget which FKEY and which modifier but it's there. |
| Sat 15 Mar | Dan Maas | I also find Adobe's 'little tool window' interfaces annoying (mostly in Photoshop and Premiere - stay away from Premiere!). I think the reason the widgets are so small (way too small IMHO) is that Macs have historically used lower resolutions than Windows PCs on typical monitor sizes. (e.g. 800x600 instead of 1024x768, or 1024x768 instead of 1280x1024). So buttons that are 'just right' on a Mac end up looking 'too small' on a PC. |
| Sun 16 Mar | Robin Debreuil | Macs do not have native support for MDI last I checked, so there probably isn't a native hotkey for switching - not sure about osx, but I've heard its the same. All those tabs can be rearranged, combined, closed, toggled by key, or tabbed away - not sure what everyone is talking about...? |
| Sun 16 Mar | | This article is interesting in the context of this conversation (it's about Microsoft's forthcoming push into Adobe's turf, and Adobe's chances of fending them off). http://www.business2.com/articles/web/0,1653,47988,00.html |
| Sun focusing on software from now on? | Fri 14 Mar | Just me (Sir to you) |
| Is Sun realy going this route? I know competing with Intel/HP/Dell is though, but BEA/IBM/Microsoft are no small fry either. Software has never been a strong point with Sun, they are silicon at hart. From: http://www.baselinemag.com/article2/0,3959,842375,00.asp We had a line we used for 15 or 20 years now at Sun—All the wood behind one arrowhead, says John Loiacono, Suns vice president in charge of operating systems (Solaris and Linux). Thats still the case, but the arrowhead has moved. The arrowhead is Java-based applications in the Sun One environment. |
| Fri 14 Mar | Pat Rice | Just look what this strategy did for NeXT and Be.... |
| Fri 14 Mar | Li-fan Chen | > Sun focusing on software from now on? > Is Sun realy going this route? All IT is down. (HW or SW) Suppose Sun becoming more a software company, what do you guess will be their tactical movements? My guess is a big believer in networking, they might look at the entire enterprise world and propose something that will really cut cost for everyone. So they probably won't jump right into fat pcs, or bleed more on thin pcs ( In the past they have projected over and over again that corporate spending on Fat PCs will be down. But the projection is always a little too far too early)--I hope they will do something completely different. Sun's competition is the whole f***ing world. It includes warner brothers, Ben and Jerry's, some remote forest company in south east asia, or your cousin's pachingo shop. We all get paid for the same reason: better solutions at lower cost. I don't see how a vague directive like 'Let's do more software' will help them much without learning more details. :-) -- David |
| Fri 14 Mar | XRD | In more that 5 years of existance, Sun has not succeeded in turning Java into money. I don't see how they can do that now especially if they are becoming weaker and weaker. |
| Fri 14 Mar | pb | Wouldn't plan on them getting out of hardware anytime soon. |
| Fri 14 Mar | Dennis Atkins | 'Just look what this strategy did for NeXT' Pat, I bought a brand new computer running Mach and NextStep (now called Mach and Cocoa) a few months back and I love it. I paid a hefty price for it too and it was worth every cent. Stable and fast! Best computer I've ever owned or developed for by a huge margin. No comparison. So whatever NeXT did, they seem to have done it right, even the name change. 'All IT is down. (HW or SW)' David, Today Adobe announced that they made unexpectedly large profits. I wasn't surprised as I contributed a grand of that to get my new NeXT computer stoked out wit hthe latest. Apparently I'm not the only one either. Other people are willing to pay a lat more for stability, speed and ease of use too. Of course there will always be a place for $500 cheap junk computers (PCs) by people who aren't particular if their computer is unstable and slow, but likewise there will always be a market for $4000 high end computers (NeXT) that do everything the right way. |
| Fri 14 Mar | Marcos | I hate to think of it, but they will probably be stretched between their no-revenue hardware and no-margin Java business models like a prisoner in a medieval rack. Disgusting, isn't it? |
| Fri 14 Mar | Li-fan Chen | I gotta admit, when I was in college with my dinky 486 Blue-lightening from IBM, I felt bad that the rich coders in the next dorm had a NeXT cube or two. How do you compare the GUI of twm/fvwm of Linux or the simple Program Manager of Windows for Workgroup 3.11 with the NeXT look? Back in the days, I like the little title bars that look like you can actually grab them showing up in Photoshop 5.0 in the fancy imaging labs. And BeOS look like it was some embedded OS stolen from the tank Tank Girl used. |
| Fri 14 Mar | Stephen Jones | ---'Of course there will always be a place for $500 cheap junk computers (PCs) by people who aren't particular if their computer is unstable and slow'---- Unless you're a developer or gamer then a $500 machine is plenty fast enough. I work with a 733Mhz home desktop, a 1.6Ghz laptop, and a 2.0Ghz work desktop, and 99.5% of the time do not notice any difference. As for stability Linux, W2000 and to a lesser extent Win XP are all rock solid. In fact if you inherit a $50 machine you can use W98SE and it will be pretty reliable. Make sure the motherboard comes from one of the big names and you get the almost the same reliability from a $500 machine than from a $5000 one. |
| Fri 14 Mar | Li-fan Chen | > $50 machine you can use W98SE and it will be pretty reliable. What????? Okay.. maybe let's quanlify that statement by saying 'assuming you are managing thousands of these W98SE boxes with a fully staff team |
| Fri 14 Mar | Robert Moir | You just watch what you say Li-Fan. I've got a Windows 98 box at work that's been doing it's job for years. Never crashed never needed any attention. Of course it's job has been 'holding a door open' for the past few years but hey. |
| Fri 14 Mar | Li-fan Chen | LOL |
| Sun 16 Mar | Stephen Jones | Sorry LiFan but W98SE was a considerable improvement on previous versions. I ran it on a laptop for three and a half years and it never crashed, which is more than I can say for XP, which seems to love random rebootings followed by send a message to MS dialog boxes. There are plenty of Pentium I's still around doing a perfectly good job of wiriting documents, searching the web and getting email. They can't be woirth much more than $50 now but if they do everything you want why upgrade? |
| The Real Problem | Thu 13 Mar | Xylaphone |
| The real problem with software is that it is always one person or a group of people trying to solve other peoples problems or trying to predict other peoples needs and create solutions. It is only when -anyone- can create their own software - to solve their own specific needs - at a given point in time - in a minimal amount of time - that the software problem will be solved. Maybe not even then... The problem is that communication is not universal. Your ideas and thoughts on a topic are not mine just as mine ideas and thoughts on the same topic are not yours. There is no piece of software that can transition the two. Or is there? |
| Thu 13 Mar | anon | '...that the software problem will be solved....' What problem? |
| Thu 13 Mar | Matthew Lock | I would say the 2 real problems are the difficulty of estimating how long a project will take, and the tendency of clients to keep changing the goals of the project. I also have a pet theory that the price of packaged software has lead people to erroneously believe that custom software development costs too much. |
| Fri 14 Mar | anon | The two problems are related. Probably the biggest source of uncertainty that is under the control of the customer is project scope. If you can manage the scope, most of the time the other problem goes away, or at least becomes manageable. Tell 'em if they want precise estimates, then give you precise requirements. |
| Fri 14 Mar | Mitch & Murray (from downtown) | Maybe the best first post I've seen in years. Yeah, you've got it. Ever wonder why so many vertical market apps (like vet offices, dry cleaning, etc) are such pieces of shit? Because the guys who wrote the code were vets or dry cleaners first, and software developers second. Best case, probably had their brother-in-law 'just out of the joint' do it. Why? Because THEY UNDERSTOOD THEIR BUSINESS, and wished to merely use software to do something useful like make more money with less manual work. What a concept. How many dry cleaners really understand software development? How many software developers really understand the business model of dry cleaning? The $64K question is how many dry cleaners developing their own vertical market app are willing to pay for professionals to develop it for them? Answer = almost zero. 'Hey, our app runs fine as long as you rebuild when it says 'record is not found!''. Now you get it ... |
| Fri 14 Mar | Prakash S | According to the Theory of Constraints (TOC) - there generally exists only a couple of Core problems - looks like that is what you (Xylaphone) are addressing. |
| Fri 14 Mar | | Matthew, you are absolutely right. But then those people do not know the first things about basic economics. |
| Fri 14 Mar | Ged Byrne | Remember that specialisation is not unqiue to programming. Whenever we need something donet that requires a high level of skill we need to call in the professionals: Law, plumbing, building, etc, etc. As professionals what we need to do is learn how to listen to those we serve. |
| Fri 14 Mar | Tech Chimp 03 | I think most software is fundamentally designed to improve an established process of some kind. If the process is flawed the software will be flawed and a good process will usually result in software that will meet at least 90% if not all of a clients needs. Most complaints about bug free but unsatisfactory software are the ' it doesn't do what I want it to do ' kind. Hence if a process is very well defined early on within a project and any flaws, bottlenecks, mismatches etc can be exposed and corrected, development can occur in a more timely and efficiently. However as a rule humans (including me would you believe it) tend to lapse and are not always able to thoroughly analyse or define their personal or company processes. We always seem to miss something be it detailed, trivial, obvious whatever. Maybe The Real Problem's only true answer is to ask God to make us more meticulous and detailed. Yes! God should make us all Vulcans but without the cold, logical personality and somewhat obvious inability to have loving relationships and good sex. |
| Fri 14 Mar | tapiwa | Xylaphone, I am going to play devil's advocate for a little bit. One package that immediately springs to mind, is MS Access. If you access me, the lack of a db that easy to use is what is holding back migration to suites like OpenOffice. People around the world use it to help them work better. Each access database with forms is a basic application, and for the most part, does the job well. The problem is that a lot of software developers view these custom apps as vile, and not professional, and advocate for the removal of access from users desktops. http://discuss.fogcreek.com/joelonsoftware/default.asp?cmd=show&ixPost=28465&ixReplies=26 The point they miss is that apps like this actually do the job. A user might have 20 databases that they use alone, or share with their team. To a developer, that is wrong. Why not hold the info centrally? Why not nomalize the databases better? Why not standardise the fonts? Like I said in an earlier thread, I was tempted at one point at work do create a 'better' solution to the tens of databases we use in our team of about 20. Having watched how the users used them though, I decided against it. If I built it, it might be better from an engineering perspective, but from a users' it would be hell. They are always changing things in their databases. Adding a field here and there. Creating a new report or query etc etc. All I can do is help when they are trying to do something. To expect them to learn SQL, or to produce data models normalised to the 5th form is silly. In short, maybe developers should stop looking at software as a way to solve interesting technical problems, but as a tool to allow users to create the software that they use in their day to day jobs, with everchanging requirements. |
| Fri 14 Mar | Carl | tapiwa, I think hits on a key point, one that I've been formulating in my head for some time now... I think many technical folks get so enamored with the technology or finding the perfect solution to solving 'technical' problems that they lose sight of the the real 'business' problems that they are trying to solve. A prime example of this is the OO programmer who spends so much time generating the 'perfect' object model that in his/her mind is going to solve the worlds problems. In the mean time the software gets scrapped because it doesn't meet the business' needs and never gets used because other programmers find it too massive and unwieldy. |
| Fri 14 Mar | igor | 'The real problem with cars is that it is always one person or a group of people trying to solve other peoples problems or trying to predict other peoples needs and create solutions. It is only when -anyone- can create their own car - to solve their own specific needs - at a given point in time - in a minimal amount of time - that the car problem will be solved. Maybe not even then...' You can substitute almost anything here. We've had specialization since the middle ages - or even earlier. Software is no different. |
| Fri 14 Mar | tapiwa | Maybe one day programming talents of sorts, will be equivalent to writing today. The computer = paper and paper. Software= Writing. Give someone a blank piece of paper and a pen, and they can generally put their ideas down, and communicate. On the other hand, someone with a thorough understanding of the business process might not have the ability to translate those thoughts, not into code, but into a business supporting tool. Before you dismiss the analogy, remember that until a few hundred years ago, reading and writing were the preserve of priests and kings. Folk did not read the newspaper... they listened to the Town Crier. Today, you still have professional writers, copy writers etc, but Joe Average does not need to employ someone to write a letter for him. A bit like the Cathedral and the Bazaar. I am don't think that it will happen any time soon, but one day I think the 'writing' tools will be easy enough to be available to all, and the people will have learnt to 'write' from an early age, as part of standard learning. |
| Fri 14 Mar | Brent P. Newhall | I agree with the problem, but not with the proposed solution. I would say, it is only when -anyone- can truly drive the creation of their own software - to solve their own specific needs - at a given point in time - in a minimal amount of time - that the software problem will be solved. Maybe not even then. I don't wish to harp on Extreme Programming, but that's one of the problems that XP purports to solve. The customer is on-site, s/he specifies all the functionality directly to the developers, and iterations are short enough that the customer can quickly see changes and order new functionality. |
| Fri 14 Mar | Reginald Braithwaite-Lee | I'm not convinced that most vertical apps are 'pieces of feces' :-) Most vertical apps are ugly but highly functional. They service their users' needs. That, why people use them. Software developers are no exception to this rule: look at Emacs, Linux, and Perl for examples of ugly but functional 'vertical market' software embraced by programmers. In my experience, most software projects waste way too much time and energy making the software 'user friendly' and 'scalable' and 'object oriented' and too little time making it deliver functionality in a robust and error free way. (not trying to troll, not intended to attack anyone!) -- http://www.braithwaite-lee.com |
| Fri 14 Mar | Robin Debreuil | One opposite point - most software indeed is a kind of 'automator' of current established tasks. But there is also the software that creates a new model, and opens a door for users too. Visicalc would be an obvious example. Partly software isn't always personalized enough, but more often it isn't inspiring enough - it doesn't make the user say ah-ha! If one program simplifies a step, and another makes it irrelevant, I'll vote on program 2. Great software, in a weird way, is all about destroying value. |
| Fri 14 Mar | Must be a manager | There's a circularity in the argument that started this thread. I think the fact is that perceiving the relationships and requirements of a software need is quite difficult, and few people can do it well. A good software engineer is precisely that person who can do it well. Writing is the same, by the way. Many people can write things, but some are much capture at accurately capturing meaning and intent. |
| Fri 14 Mar | Must be a manager | Whoops. Writing is the same, by the way. Many people can write things, but some are much _better_ at accurately capturing meaning and intent. |
| Sat 15 Mar | Stephen Jones | I've read in various places that Adobe is one of the 'we know much better than the luser' companies. It can get away with an atrocious interface firstly because of the other things it does better than anybody else, and secondly because so many people have been forced to use it that it has become the norm, so even programs such as Corel's Photo Paint copy the basic design. The best user interface I've seen was MS Photodraw, but because it was different from the Photoshop way of doing things it never took off (being buggy didn't help either - it was the source of my favourite MSKB bug, 'MS Photo Draw won't start if an odd number of fonts are installed on the machine'. Now from what I've heard Photoshop is positively user-friendly compared to Quark Express. |
| Sat 15 Mar | A_Troll_001 | What does that have to do with 'The Real Problem'? |
| Sat 15 Mar | Stephen Jones | Dear A troll, Nothing. It was meant to be a reply to another message. I don't know if it was my fault, or if it was a bug in the software that sent me to the wrong link for the reply. I have seen this problem arise half a dozen times or so in the last week. Hopefully all three messages will be deleted. Steve |
| Sat 15 Mar | Hoang Do | I think it boils down to a mentality problem. We do what we do to make money to survive in the world. In order to make money, the business man needs a certain problem solved. He would think: 'how can I solve it while keeping costs down'. He hires an engineer and that is already a level of indirection. If he has to go through a team, that's two or three levels of indirection. The engineer/programmer is more concerned about his product's structure. He is far enough removed from the customer that chances of what he produces will satisfy the customer is a little low. If he were his own customer, it will be another matter. Just notice how much you change your initial requirements if you were to write a program for yourself. More than 90% of the time, it has morphed away from the initial plans. |
| Sat 15 Mar | LazyCat | 'Like I said in an earlier thread, I was tempted at one point at work do create a 'better' solution to the tens of databases we use in our team of about 20. Having watched how the users used them though, I decided against it. If I built it, it might be better from an engineering perspective, but from a users' it would be hell. They are always changing things in their databases. Adding a field here and there. Creating a new report or query etc etc. All I can do is help when they are trying to do something.' This is a very good point. Small db's are like pieces of paper on your desk, while central db's are like libraries. Both have their place. It might become really silly when librarians (db guys) start to dictate how the papers should reside on the local desks, and how they should be accessed. I have seen some db guys so fixated on the idea of storing everything in a central db that the info becomes a lot less usable to those currently actively using it. If a central db does not fit user needs, it should not become an end by itself. This was a good essay on paper use which has good parallels with local vs. central storage and usage arguments. Here is the link: http://www.gladwell.com/2002/2002_03_25_a_paper.htm |
| Sun 16 Mar | X. J. Scott | I think its already true that people write software to fulfill their own needs -- when they are motivated to do so. Example: VST software synthesizers. Steinberg created a decent C++ plugin API for softsynthesizers. Now tens of thousands of people, most of whom have no previous experience programming, are writing DSP code in C++, learning about convolution, comparing the performance of various FFT algorithms, learning about imaginary numbers, complex math, pole-zero diagrams, Chebychev polynomials, obscure FP errors in various processors and how to get around them, synchronizing multiple processors at the interrupt level with their own handmade PPC assembly, etc etc. All pretty advanced stuff. Most of them are musicians with little or no prior programming experience. They do it because it enables them to make cool things. The complexity of the math, the difficulties of the problems, the subtleties of awesome UI design, these are all things that an average guy with a high school education and a few years experience playing in a band master if he is motivated. |
| I have a confession to make. | Thu 13 Mar | Mark Hoffman |
| After all the sermons Ive given to people about good software engineering practices, about raising the standard in our industry, about ensuring your design is solid and more importantly about using a testing framework to routintely test your software....I just blew it big time. I made a number of changes to some code, didnt really think them through all the way and worse yet, didnt test them adequately....and then went to a meeting to demo my system and watched it fail in a most spectacular way. I wonder if this ever happens to Steve McConnell? |
| Thu 13 Mar | Brent P. Newhall | Ouch. Sorry to hear this. It happens to the best, though. I hope the meeting attendees were able to pretty much laugh it off? (This illustrates the benefit of automating things so that, for example, you *can't* compile without having already built tests.) |
| Thu 13 Mar | Prakash S | It's always easier said than done,... |
| Thu 13 Mar | Robert Moir | If it helps, it probably happened to Steve McConnell so many times he resolved to change his ways for good and write a damn book about it or something ;-) |
| Thu 13 Mar | Alberto | Never happened to me. I always do the right thing. yeah right.... remember - 'to err is human'. |
| Thu 13 Mar | Anonymous Coward | To err is human, but to really screw things up you need a computer. |
| Fri 14 Mar | | Look at it this way - you will never make that mistake again! (You won't, right?) |
| Fri 14 Mar | ScottB | I find demos are very nerve-wracking. I've tested, double-checked the code, tested, got colleagues to use the system, tested, etc...
In the demo - 'this is the system, click on the button xxx to use feature xxx |
| Fri 14 Mar | Mike | The computer allows you to make mistakes faster than any other invention, with the possible exception of handguns and tequila |
| Fri 14 Mar | Just me (Sir to you) | Thing with demos is that they almost always happen in unusual circumstances (Running all the servers of a laptop that goes into sleepmode right in the middle of things, disconnected from the DNS servers with no LMHosts file entries, switching to a second monitor so you can keep Powerpoint going on the first screen, ...), that are often ouside of the platforms target constraints. Always prepare for a demo failing in the most horrible way. (easier said than done, I know). |
| Fri 14 Mar | Peter Ibbotson | I have some superb demos I'd like to do, but since they'd all involve 'real' comms using a phone line I just don't dare! |
| Fri 14 Mar | Prakash S | reminds me of the Windows 98 demo by Bill Gates - that was hilarious :-) |
| Fri 14 Mar | GiorgioG | This is why I think most demos should be 'Smoke & Mirrors' until the app is ready for production/release because I don't like explaining (excuse-making) that 'Well we're still working on it.' |
| Fri 14 Mar | Brent P. Newhall | Speaking of demos: I once read an article of advice by former engineers at Be, Inc. about giving demos (Be demos regularly amazed audiences). One suggestion was to always use the exact same computer to demo as you had to practice on. In other words, change NOTHING between practice sessions and the demo. |
| Fri 14 Mar | GiorgioG | Brent, That only works if you're doing the demo at your site unless you've got alot of $ to spend on beefy laptops. Terminal Server/Remote Access, etc is no good because you can't depend on the client giving you internet access at their site, not to mention firewalls, etc. Boss had to do a demo at a big client's site and the only access they give you is through port 80. Problem is we were going to use VPN to get into another client's office (with their permission) to demo something we had done for them. In the end, I put RemotelyAnywhere (remote access over http s/w) on my home machine (cable modem), set it to run on port 80, setup the VPN client to our other customer and ran it that way. Needless to say it was dogsh*t slow and we wound up bringing these folks into our office 2 months later to do a real demo. |
| Fri 14 Mar | Tj | I believe bringing your own machines is a must. Unless you're trying to score a hail mary by installing it in front of them. PCs are too variable in too many ways. Other reasons are that you care a lot about security and you want to be considerate to your clients' machines |
| Fri 14 Mar | Mark Hoffman | Oh I wished I could blame the problems on differences in the computers, but this is an web-based intranet application that runs from a single server. |
| Fri 14 Mar | HeyMacarana | No one's perfect. Not even Steve McConnell. |
| Sat 15 Mar | smkr4 | Well, were you forced by management to make those changes? :) What kind of time pressure were you under? I regularly do demos at work. No matter how large or small, we always seem to wind up making ridiculous and invasive changes at the last minute, after we pledge to freeze the code at a given point. Generally, we manage to avoid blow-ups, but at the very least, these last-minute changes lead to making our software quite unmanageable after a number of demos. Thus, we then spend a lot of time refactoring between demos. Quite the vicious cycle, that--we make huge messes for demos, and then clean them up in the interim. :) I'm not trying to make this a soapbox for ranting about my job, but just giving an example of a general point. Demos are pretty much the antithesis of good software management processes, because they often carry with them the time pressure and the anxiety that avert the creation of great software. That's not to say one should never give demos, but they should be few and far between, and with much aforethought. (the worst, by the way, is when you're in the 'Surprise! We have a demo in 5 minutes!' situation--never has my life flashed before my eyes quite so quickly...) |
| Sat 15 Mar | Norrick | 'The computer allows you to make mistakes faster than any other invention, with the possible exception of handguns and tequila ' Comedy GOLD! In all seriousness - I doubt there is a coder amongst us who has not, for one reason or another, at one time or another, blown it big-time on a simple piece of functionality and ended up kicking himself. It goes with the territory. The trick is not to avoid mistakes, but to make as few as possible and avoid making the same mistakes more than once. If you can do that you're in pretty good shape. |
| Sun 16 Mar | Bella | You should be fired. You NEVER make a change to production level code without proper change control approval in place. |
| job prospects | Thu 13 Mar | anonymous |
| Given 3 interviews in 3 weeks for developer positions, what do you think are the average job prospects? 1 in 3? 1 in 5? what are peoples previous experiences? |
| Thu 13 Mar | Chris Tavares | My previous experience has been three interviews in 6 MONTHS, not 3 weeks. If you're getting that many interviews, you must have something people want. Sounds like your prospects are fairly good, assuming you don't flub the interview. |
| Thu 13 Mar | anonymous | Actually I had nothing in the previous 2 and half months, I guess it's a bit of luck |
| Thu 13 Mar | Darin | It depends whether your talking at the interview meets, or better yet, exceeds, the claims you made to get the interview in the first place. |
| Thu 13 Mar | optimistic coder | You'll get the job if your skills match what they're after. Seriously, there are so many different tech skills these days that all this talk of over supply is just there to keep us in crappy jobs that we hate. |
| Fri 14 Mar | Li-fan Chen | In times of bad economy do you guys suppose the agencies have all the advantages? They seems to be the only one promising to be able to sift through thousands upon thousands of resumes no one can read through. Sometimes I feel so bad for these poor companies in desperate need to sift through the hay that I wish two paragraphs, 8 frames of powerpoint, or a 1 minute video is all job seekers ever submit. -- David |
| Fri 14 Mar | Mr Jack | If you're good, I'd say you'd get three job offers. |
| Fri 14 Mar | RocketJeff | 'If you're good, I'd say you'd get three job offers. ' What's your definition of 'good.' In this market (and, really, any time other then the bubble of the late 90's), it means fitting the employeer's requirements. He could be an excellent C++ programmer (for example) with great communication skills but not be 'good' for a Java (or Cobol, VB, whatever) position. He could know manufacturing systems down pat but not be 'good' for a position with a financial company. It's more about fit then it is about good. |
| Fri 14 Mar | anonymous | most of my previous experience is in C++ and Java, the positions I have interviewed for have been varied, from PHP in one case to C to Java.It's hard to say. |
| Fri 14 Mar | one programmer's opinion | RocketJeff wrote, ---------------------------------------------------------------------- What's your definition of 'good.' In this market (and, really, any time other then the bubble of the late 90's), it means fitting the employeer's requirements. He could be an excellent C++ programmer (for example) with great communication skills but not be 'good' for a Java (or Cobol, VB, whatever) position. He could know manufacturing systems down pat but not be 'good' for a position with a financial company. It's more about fit then it is about good. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- This type of reasoning is what I expect from a clueless employer (98% of them seem to fall into this category). There shouldn't be such a thing as a COBOL, VB, C++, or Java position! If employers in non I.T. related industries (i.e. Insurance, manufacturing, etc.) need to discriminate based on requirements then it should be based on a potential job candidate's knowledge of the software development lifecycle. What happens to a new hire when a software project that uses COBOL, VB, C++, etc. gets canceled after 3 months? Also, industry knowledge is highly overrated in my opinion. The reason why some employers look for it when hiring typically has nothing to do with a person being a good software developer. With all of the 'catch-22's' that exist in this industry, it simply amazes me that anyone is able find employment or stay employed. You should hire developers based on talent and provide training to those that happen to lack a specific technical skill. |
| Fri 14 Mar | RocketJeff | 'You should hire developers based on talent and provide training to those that happen to lack a specific technical skill. ' I agree, completely (since I'm an out of work IT guy). However, in the current market, employeers are able to find very talented developers who already have the specific technical skills they want. It isn't an either/or situation. |
| Fri 14 Mar | Seth Gordon | Since the new year[*], I've had five real interviews[**] and four rejections. (Still waiting to hear back from #5.) One of the companies that rejected me interviewed fifteen people for a single position; another interviewed about 50 people for six to eight position, and checked references for 23 (including myself); a third interviewed three people for two positions (ouch!), and I don't know what the statistics are for the fourth. So I figure that with every interview, I have about a 5% chance of getting an offer. Obviously, I'm trying to figure out how to increase my odds, but I'm trying not to invest too much hope in any one company that I interview at, and trusting that if I keep working at it for long enough, *one* place I interview at is going to make me an acceptable offer. [*]I was laid off in November and got no interviews in November and December, but that's not surprising. [**]I define a 'real interview' as one that's face-to-face with someone at the company that's hiring me, as opposed to a phone screening or an interview with a recruiting firm. |
| Fri 14 Mar | T. Norman | 'However, in the current market, employeers are able to find very talented developers who already have the specific technical skills they want. It isn't an either/or situation.' They can find developers who match a long shopping list of skills, but they aren't finding many *talented* developers like that. Most of the people who match their shopping list lied on their resume or exaggerated the truth, and most of the others just happened to sit on projects that involved the specific languages and platforms, but they aren't really *good*. |
| Sat 15 Mar | anonymous | Do all empoyers actually get back to you? I am yet to here from some of them yet... |
| Sat 15 Mar | Bella | > Given 3 interviews in 3 weeks for developer positions, what do you think are the average job prospects? 1 in 3? Let's say there are 5 people interviewed per job. If all people have the same odds of getting hired, you have a 1/5 chance of getting each job. 1/5 + 1/5 + 1/5 = 3/5 chance of getting a job. |
| Sat 15 Mar | Bella | > What happens to a new hire when a software project that uses COBOL, VB, C++, etc. gets canceled after 3 months? One option is to fire him, and hire someone else who fits your new needs. Of course, the company must take all factors into effect. Cost of rehiring, cost of retraining a new employee, impact of reputation of firm, impact on current employees psyche, etc. vs cost of retraining existing resource, etc |
| Sat 15 Mar | Seth Gordon | Make that 'five real interviews and *five* rejections'. It's just like college admissions ... when you see the thin envelope in your mailbox, you know it's not good news. Bella -- if you go on three interviews and you have a 20% chance of an offer for each one, the total chance of success is not 80%, but slightly under 50%. A 20% chance of an offer is equivalent ot an 80% chance of *not* getting an offer, and (assuming that the three interviews are statistically independent) the chance of not getting an offer for any of the three interviews is therefore 80%^3. |
| Sun 16 Mar | Bella | Seth, It's no wonder you're unemployed. You're an idiot. |
| Sun 16 Mar | Harlequin | Bella, Seth is correct. You have a 48.8% chance of getting hired, and a 51.2% on not getting hired. Basic probability theory. |
| Sun 16 Mar | Bella | Here is some more simple probabilty theory. P(getting EXACTLY one offer) = 3C1 x (1/5)^1 x (4/5)^2 = 6 x 1/5 x 16/25 = .768 = 76.8% P(getting EXACTLY 2 offers) = 3C2 x (1/5)^2 x (4/5)^1 = 3 x 1/25 x 4/5 = .096 = 9.6% P(getting all 3 jobs offers) = 1/5 * 1/5 * 1/5 = 1/125 = .8% or P(getting EXACTLY 3 offers) = 3C3 x (1/5)^3 x (4/5)^0 = 1 x 1/125 x 1 = .768 = .008 = .8% P(getting AT LEAST one job offer) = P(exactly one offer) + P(exactly 2 offers) + P(exactly 3 offers) = 76.8% + 9.6% + .8% = 87.2% |
| Sun 16 Mar | Stephen Jones | Dear Bella, Your math is hopeless, although I presume your last post is just a pisstake. He is asking about the probability of being offered a job as opposed to not being offered a job. So the easiest thing to do is to calculate the odds of his not being offered a job. The first time it is 80%. The second time it is 4/5 of 80%, which is 64%. The third time it is 4/5 of 64% which is 51.2% , exactlly as Seth said. |
| Sun 16 Mar | Vegas? | P(getting AT LEAST one job offer) = P(exactly one offer) + P(exactly 2 offers) + P(exactly 3 offers) = 76.8% + 9.6% + .8% = 87.2% This one made me laugh. |
| Is Inheritance a Pillar of OO? | Wed 12 Mar | Ged Byrne |
| Ive had an interesting discussion (argument) at work over whether or not inheritance is possible in VB. He sent me this link and showed me something similar: http://www.larrymusa.com/vboop.asp The approach is using the ability of VB to implement an Interface. I argued that this is composition, not inheritance. Composition is considered preferable to Inheritance. Ive read this advice in both GOF and Effective Java, so calling it Inheritance rather than composition is doing VB a disservice. http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?CompositionInsteadOfInheritance http://saturn.cs.unp.ac.za/~peterw/objects1/inheritance/tsld007.htm Of course, its important to call it Inheritance because Inheritance is one of the 3 pillars of OO, along with Encapsulation and Polymorphism. Inheritance is the oft-quoted reason for dismissing VB6 as a true OO language. Thing is that Inheritance is one of the most abused concepts of OO. http://medialab.di.unipi.it/web/IUM/Programmazione/OO/what/abuse.html As I say, it is now generally accepted that Composition is Preferable to Inheritance, and yet Inheritance is still one of the first things taught when introducing OO to students. In my experience the proper use of interfaces is given very little time. Instead, they are made to look like a poor substitute for multiple inheritance. When Inheritance was introduced as a pillar of OO was that a mistake for which we are now paying for? Should those three pillars of OO be Abstraction, Polymorphism and Encapsulation with Inheritance being delegated to being just one way of achieving abstraction? When the designers of VB decided to allow Composition but not Inheritance were they actually doing a smart thing? |
| Wed 12 Mar | John Topley | Inheritance still has an important place in the OOP practitioner's toolkit, as long as it's ensured that subclasses are always going to be logical subtypes i.e. they follow the 'is-a' rule. |
| Wed 12 Mar | Robin Debreuil | I think those books say 'favor' composition over inheritance which is more for when it isn't clear which is better... I would guess the biggest problem is when people finally get used to it, they 'inherit' the color of their socks and use that to hang their curtains (in my case anyway : ). Inheritance certainly has its central place imo, just you have to be aware what all you are committing to when you allow it. As to whether a language is oo without it (or without encapsulation), or 'what is a pillar', its just semantics. Certainly a language is without one of the big benefits of oo if its missing any of these types of things - that doesn't mean it isn't well suited to its core task either. |
| Wed 12 Mar | Matt H. | VB 6.0 is object-based. Object-Based pretty much means 'everything but inheritance' (maybe not operator overloading either. :-) VB.Net is object-oriented. :-) Yes, inheritance is a pillar of OO. Books that claim to teach OO in VB (and there are some) are probablly figuring the 80/20 rule - but, sadly, they may leave people with a false impression of what OO truely is. I'm currently taking CS 611 (software engineering) - we just got to OO Design. The professor basically said that OO means UML, rational rose, and use cases. Ugh. (It's a theory course, not a coding course.) I feel bad for the students that don't have a coding background that now think that's what OO is. :-) regards, |
| Wed 12 Mar | Frederik Slijkerman | In my (limited) experience, nobody at a university has any clue as to what OOP really is about. In one 'advanced' Java class, the professor once said that he had never been able to find a purpose for inheritance and that it would be best not to use it... |
| Wed 12 Mar | Will | then Fred, you were very unlucky at university. Inheritance is very useful for specialisation etc. Visual components come to mind as a good example of where inheritance beats interfaces hands-down. |
| Wed 12 Mar | John Topley | • Is VB 6.0 object based? Yes. • Does VB 6.0 allow inheritance of interfaces? Yes. • Does VB 6.0 allow inheritance of implementation? No. More interesting, is how many VB 6.0 developers actually use these features, because in my professional experience, it's not many. |
| Wed 12 Mar | Rahoul Baruah | Whether it is or it isn't is not the important thing to me. The real problem is the number of ex-procedural programmers I meet (and whose code I have to debug) who think they know OO because they've figured out inheritance. I can't believe it when I see some of the convoluted, monstrously huge classes, with hundreds of methods, where your never sure which of the tens of ancestors it was introduced in. In it's place, inheritance is fantastic. But I wish the OO 'teachers' would stop emphasising it. |
| Wed 12 Mar | Just me (Sir to you) | If you can stomach it read something like http://www.cas.mcmaster.ca/~emil/publications/fragile/ I think the main problem with implementatiion inheritance is that it is very seductive to use since it gives you so much result for such a small effort to start with, while at the same time it binds you into a very broad and very ill defined longterm contract. It is like giving live handgranades to to a bunch of preschoolers where the safetypins are popsicles. |
| Wed 12 Mar | Karel | In the big picture it is all about commonality & variability. Deal with commonality via normalization - inheritance is one mechanism of normalization. Deal with variability via indirection - polymorphism/dynamic despatch is one mechanism of indirection. Indirection and normalization look different at different scales |
| Wed 12 Mar | Just me (Sir to you) | Karel, Your writing is terse but I will try it anyway. In real world systems many things initialy fixed become 'variable' over time. Somtimes this includes things that you have normalized. Service chains that make liberal use of interfaces, delegation and aggregation, while initialy more work, seem to be a more flexible way of dealing with the changes in 'variability' over time than normalization under the form of inheritance as implemented in many contemporary programming environments. |
| Wed 12 Mar | Robin Debreuil | I think big pictures are best described with small words |
| Wed 12 Mar | Ged Byrne | I'm certainly not questioning the _usefulness_ of Inheritance, but rather the _importance_. The way OO is presented now inheritance is one of the first concepts introduced. As Rahoul and Sir say, this is not the right place for it. It really belongs in the advanced classes. What should be introduced from the start is the idea of Abstraction, and how it can be achieved. |
| Wed 12 Mar | Ged Byrne | Thinking on it, the problem is not just with the teaching, but also the language desing. In Effective Java Blochs 15th item is 'Design and document for inheritance or else prohibit it.' http://java.sun.com/docs/books/effective/toc.html At the moment you Java and other OO languages allow and encourage inheritance by default. Surely the language should disallow inheritance by default. Instead of having to explicitly declare something final, shouldn't everything be final unless the programmer explicitly decalares it inheritable? |
| Wed 12 Mar | John Topley | Fascinating idea, Ged. |
| Wed 12 Mar | Robin Debreuil | That's how C# works - all methods are non-virtual by default. So if you want to inherit, you first have to mark the method virtual, and then the subclass has to specifically say it is going to 'override' that method (as opposed to using 'new'). I really like that about it. Another question could be, should classes be sealed by default... I don't think so, but it is the next step I guess. |
| Wed 12 Mar | Ged Byrne | Robin, what exactly do you mean by 'Sealed'? |
| Wed 12 Mar | Thomas Eyde | Refactoring in C# is a pain. Adding and removing virtual modifiers takes time, and you have to remember it. And, if I am not mistaken, you only have to declare a method as virtual in the base class. All descendants thereafter is free to override. When we are deciding today what should be allowed for the future (using final, sealed, virtual, whatever) then we are guessing. And every restriction is reduced flexibility and freedom. I argue that we can't possibly know what the proper use of our object today will be 6 months from now. So we can't design for it, either. We should design for today's needs, not tomorrow. If we discover that a class must be sealed, or a method can't be overridden, then fine. If not, we should let our object be open for future extentions. |
| Wed 12 Mar | backintheday | One of the reasons for introducing inheritance so soon must be to explain where the .toString came from without us writing it. Books and courses do tend to approach the language from first principles. Looking at exisiting code and working out how it works seems to be a far more useful way of learning (for me, anyway). |
| Wed 12 Mar | David Clayworth | I think inheritance is emphasised in the early stages of learning OO because it has such potential power. If someone comes to OO wondering what it's about and whether they should be interested in it, they will look at the pillars. Encapsulation looks like it might reduce mistakes, but you have to write extra code, and every developer secretly believes they won't make those mistakes anyway. Polymorphism looks nice, makes some things conceptually easier, but won't reduce the amount of code you have to write. Ah, but inheritance! Who can resist the thought of being able to create a whole new piece of functionality by just rewriting the few bits that are different? Everyone can see the potential. Everyone can think of a case where that would have been useful. Also inheritance is unquestionably Object Oriented. It's distinctive. If you are using inheritance, eveybody knows you are writing OO code. I think that's why teachers teach it early - it feels like you are really learning something new. |
| Wed 12 Mar | John Topley | Sealed in C# is the same as final in Java, I believe. C# is the same as Delphi in the respect that methods have to be specifically marked as overridable. Anders Hejlsberg is the common factor in both languages. I read an interview with him in which he explained why this is the case (it's for performance reasons) but unfortunately I can't find a reference to it now. |
| Wed 12 Mar | Edoc | This reminds me of the 'OOP Oversold' article at: http://www.geocities.com/tablizer/oopbad.htm Which might hold a shred of a viewpoint if you can get past the author's unpleasant ranting. I've found inheritance useful for limited domains, such as user interfaces, but not very helpful for many common tasks. In most cases, simple prototyping ('cloning') is good enough. |
| Wed 12 Mar | Go Linux Go! | To answer the question about sealed classes in C#: By marking a class as sealed, you tell the compiler that no other classes can be derived from it. I do agree that inheritance is a pillar of OO, but that is often grossly abused. Interfaces are a somewhat abstract concept, but anyone can understand inheritance. It just makes sense in our minds. Interfaces take a second longer to click. Unfortunately, many people aren't well versed in good OOP practices. Just recently, I was reading a book that discussed building a multi-threaded server built on UDP. In it, the author built a Mutex class, then derived his Thread class from Mutex and then finally built an Application class derived from his Thread class. A simple 'is a type of' test would have shown that his class structure was broken. |
| Wed 12 Mar | Tal Rotbart | The Mutex->Thread->App person mentioned above was mis-using inheritance in a classic way -- to 'inherit' functionality (Instead of Mutex used-by a Thread used-by an Application). I think that if you teach newbies to use interfaces (and interface inheritance) to define the 'is-a' relationships, you make them understand inheritance better, because implementation lazyness will not be the reason they use it... |
| Wed 12 Mar | Tal Rotbart | John Topley mentioned above that Hejlsberg (the sell out that he is, sorry...) chose the explicit override approach for performance reasons. To clarify that -- Hejlsberg wanted to avoid the v-table lookup for each method call (plus enabling inline optimization in some cases) which Java curtails for having methods all be overrideable. An example scenario where this is disasterous -- You need to inherit from a component and override a certain method to fix a bug that the no-source-code 3rd-party component includes (and which they intend to fix somewhere in Q4). Well, you just can't, because they haven't explicitly allowed this method to be overrideable. So, instead, you need to delegate and redirect the entire API of that component... And of course that 3rd party have not provided an interface for that component... *Doh* |
| Wed 12 Mar | John Topley | 'the sell out that he is, sorry...' Well he had the choice of remaining at Borland whilst Delphi was evolving into a Web development tool and Borland was wasting millions on silly name changes, or moving to Microsoft and getting the chance to work on the development of a new development platform and language. And get paid a lot of money for doing it. Not a difficult choice IMHO! |
| Wed 12 Mar | Tj | (IIRC, java programmers tend to escape the performance problems by using obfuscators, which can declare non-overridden methods 'final.' This isn't normally decidable, but the programmer can tell the obfuscator not to worry about weird cases.) |
| Wed 12 Mar | Just me (Sir to you) | Tal, If you are talking .NET, with the full metadata present in the assembly generating the code for a quick full front aggregate should be a piece of cake. |
| Wed 12 Mar | Robin Debreuil | 'If we discover that a class must be sealed, or a method can't be overridden, then fine. If not, we should let our object be open for future extentions. ' The thing is, it is much easier to unseal a sealed object in version 2, than put the genie back in the bottle. Imagine doing a library, releasing version 1, and then maybe for security reasons realizing that a class/method that is now being used by an untold number of third party projects has to be taken away. This is the nightmare scenario of leaving all your loose strands open. If you do leave something open, you better be sure you can work around any problems that may crop up with it - that alone can add hundreds of hours to a project if you tend leave things open indiscriminantly. It's not that different than making all your methods and properties public, in the sense that you are commiting to defend against any abuse that can come from below (which can be much nastier with access to all that is protected) as opposed to just from the outside. Also, helper methods that could have been private may now need to be protected, so you tend to expose a lot more of your interface than you would have with a sealed class. Which means more documentation, more thinking, more money etc. etc... I do think inheritance is great, but only in places you are willing to support it! |
| Wed 12 Mar | David Roper | Not wanting to stray too far from the original line of argument, may I suggest that the principal problem underlying the 'inheritance' issue is typically a lack of thought about, or even understanding of, the real relationships that exist between objects (i.e. instances of a particular class). The standard description that inheritance implements an 'is-a' relationship falls over when you ask the simple question, what do you mean by 'is-a'? My personal preference is that it means 'is a form of' in the sense of a Linean taxonomy with inheritance thus being used to implement aggregation or specialisation of characteristics. The trouble lies when inheritance is used to implement other relationships or, particularly, to modify behaviour. The classic case of this is creating sub-classes based upon the role that an objects can play, for example Employee or Customer or Patient or Doctor or....... |
| Wed 12 Mar | DavidG | I think the core feature of OO being discussed here is polymorphism. Polymorphism can be implemented using inheritance or composition or a combination of both. Inheritance can be used poorly as with any language feature. Just because it is often abused does not make it a bad idea that should be prohibited. By that argument, we'll have to eliminate all language features, since they all can and are used poorly. |
| Wed 12 Mar | Ged Byrne | DavidG, The argument is not that Inheritance should be prohibited, but rather restricted. At the moment Inheritance is presented as a basic skill needed to use OO. Since it is so powerful and liable to misuse, shouldn't it instead be treated as an advanced technique that should be used with caution. With regards to a specific class, the argument is that inheritance should be prohibited unless the class has been designed with inheritance in mind. As Robin points out, inheritance can cause problems if it is not done properly. |
| Wed 12 Mar | Chris Tavares | In my opinion, the most important feature of OO programming, the thing that makes it different from what came before, is polymorphism. Inheritance is a useful reuse technique, and encapsulation can be done in just about any other language. In early OO systems, like Smalltalk, polymorphism and inheritance were independent concepts. If you called obj.foo, ANY object that implemented the foo method could be used regardless of it's base class. This behavior is preserved in Python and Javascript and other languages, and it's a real boon. Smalltalk didn't support multiple inheritance OR interfaces, but it didn't need them - as long as the object supported the specific methods you need, it's good. However, OO really took off when C++ started getting mindshare. In C++, every variable must have a declared type. As a result, polymorphism and inheritance got tied together, since inheritance was how you linked types together. In these languages, class A's version of foo is different from class B's version of foo, and never the two shall meet. Java arguably took the worst combination of the two techniques - single rooted inheritance tree + static typing. As a result they had to hack interfaces in to work around the limitations. Anyway, my point is that in order to teach the important thing (polymorphism) instructors using C++ or Java were forced to first teach inheritance, because these languages require inheritance to implement polymorphism. |
| Wed 12 Mar | Chris Tavares | Oh, and just a minor comment on inheritance. Several posts have mentioned that inheritance should only be used for an 'is-a' relationship. I would argue that this term is vague and confusing. What inheritance should be used for is an 'is-substitutable-for' relationship. This is known as the Liskov substitutability critera, and it's an important thing to remember. It makes it much easier to reason about inheritance. For example: Square vs. rectangle. Square is-a rectangle? Yep, at least in the geometric sense. Square is-substitutable-for rectangle? Nope. Why? Well, suppose that the interface of rectangle does something like this: class Rectangle { void setWidth(); void setHeight(); }; In a rectangle, you're allowed to set width and height separately. In a square, changing one changes the other. As a result, the 'contract' of the Square class has a constraint that rectangles don't, and so you can't use a square everywhere you use a rectange. Therefore, square should NOT inherit from rectangle. Hope this helped, -Chris |
| Wed 12 Mar | Ged Byrne | Chris, Thanks for that. I was trying to figure out what made OO in Smalltalk and Javascript different from Java and C++. I knew it had to have something to do with static typing, but wasn't sure. |
| Wed 12 Mar | Robin Debreuil | I think teaching how to subclass and why that is useful should be right in the basics. Teaching how to make a class that can be subclassed should come sometime in the second semester ; ). |
| Wed 12 Mar | passerby | The kinds of polymorphism offered in languages like Smalltalk is very different from what is available in C++. The former offers syntactic polymorphism, while the latter provides semantic polymorphism. The choice is a trade-off between flexibility and risk. Bertrand Meyer provides an excellent discussion of these issues (as well as just about every issue concerning OO) in his book: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/asin/0136291554 I used to develop large systems in Smalltalk and never found lack of static typing to be the issue some folks claim it is. More often it was a lifesaver. I can see its value, though. One thing I do not like about Java's type system is that it goes way out of its way to ensure semantic consistency, but defeats the entire effort by not providing generics. As soon as you put things into collections, you take all the risks associated with dynamic typing and get none of the benefit. As far as inheritance goes, I use the approach described by a previous poster based on the Liskov Substitutabilty Principle most often. Robert Martin discusses this in his book: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/asin/0135974445 |
| Wed 12 Mar | Ged Byrne | Robin, An important distinction. I think that makes absolute sense. Creating applets could be an ideal introduction to subclassing when teaching Java. |
| Wed 12 Mar | rwh | 'Therefore, square should NOT inherit from rectangle.' No, a *modifiable* square can't be used where you expect a *modifiable* rectangle. If squares and rectangles have value semantics (their properties are defined at creation and can't be modified), then there's no problem at all. |
| Wed 12 Mar | Chris Tavares | Which just comes back to the fact that no one type hierarchy will work for all systems. |
| Thu 13 Mar | Toby Reyelts | Chris wrote: Java arguably took the worst combination of the two techniques - single rooted inheritance tree + static typing. As a result they had to hack interfaces in to work around the limitations. ------- Interfaces in Java are no more of a hack then pure abstract classes in C++ are a hack. In fact, interfaces in Java are rather elegant, because they bring the concept of interface inheritance into the language as a first class feature while entirely sidestepping the issues associated with multiple implementation inheritance. and Chris said: If you called obj.foo, ANY object that implemented the foo method could be used regardless of it's base class. ------- What you describe with Smalltalk is structural conformance. The problem with structural conformance is that the implementation details of a method are exposed to the user in order for them to discern the implicit interfaces of the methods parameters. It should be obvious that this is bad - especially for programming in the large. You can see the same problem with C++ templates, which are also based on structural conformance. |
| Thu 13 Mar | Tj | People probably read too much into Java. Generics is the main big thing for Java 1.5. |
| Thu 13 Mar | Liron Levy | IMHO inheritance per se is not a pillar of OOP. You need to look at what stands behind the idea of inheritance which is re-use. This is the most important idea and not inheritance. Using interfaces and composition is just another way to do re-use. Just my 2 cents ... |
| Thu 13 Mar | treefrog | Chris wrote: 'In a rectangle, you're allowed to set width and height separately. In a square, changing one changes the other. As a result, the 'contract' of the Square class has a constraint that rectangles don't, and so you can't use a square everywhere you use a rectange.' I'm sorry, but I don't buy this argument: William of Occam wrote 'Do not multiply objects without necessity' (Occam's Razor). If two different classes enforce the same contract, why have two classes at all? Chris's example illustrates the degree of ambiguity present in the English language. Square and rectangle do present the same interface: They both have 4 sides, and they both have 90 degree angles at all verticies. As rwh pointed out, the problem might come with modifiable squares and modifiable rectangles - a distinction that would be made as soon as one tried to design a class hierarchy. The distinction between 'is-a' and 'is-substitutable-for' needs to be made with care. The ideas of design by contract and inheritence do interact, but when posing the question 'Is A substitutable for B?' one needs to be aware of who is doing the substituting. There are not two actors involved (A and B) but a minimum of three: 'Is A substitutable for B from the point of view of C?', where C is the class or entity that would be using A or B. Returning to chris's example: If I am building a wall, then I do not care whether the blocks I use are square or rectangular, as far as the builder is concerned, the contract must enforce that they have parallel sides. However, if I am creating windows or panels, then the independence of setHeight() and setWidth() may be an important part of the contract. |
| Thu 13 Mar | Ged Byrne | The whole Square vs Rectangle problem comes down to contract rather than behaviour. A Rectangle may have all sides of equal length and it is a square at that time. However, it is not guaranteed to be a square. There is no contract that height will always be equal to width. When an object is declared as a Square, it is being explicitly stated that this is a square, and that height must always equal width. |
| Thu 13 Mar | Tal Rotbart | A Square and a Triangle both implement the 'GeometricShape' interface which inherits from 'Shape'. However, both Triangle and Square are implemented differently: Square inherits from Rectangle (which inherits from Polygon) but enforces the 'equal width and height' contract. Triangle inherits from Polygon. etc. Get the drift? :) |
| Thu 13 Mar | Robin Debreuil | I always thought the square/rectangle was one of the worst examples used to describe inheritance, I'm not sure why it always comes up... Having actually programmed a lot of graphics (and thus done more than one oo shape hierarchy) the conclusion I always come to is, why the hell do you care if it is a square or a rectangle? You can constrain a rectangle and you can check if both sides are equal if you need to. If that is not enough (it always has been for me though), you obviously need a separate unrelated shape. It would take some very broad categories, proabably unrealted to geometry, before a 2Dshape class would need more that one level of inheritance imo. The overworked shape sample is probably a major reason I (and no doubt others) went hog wild with 10 levels of inheritance in the first while. I know it isn't said to be for real world use, but why use a sample that encourages the very thing beginners seem to always get wrong? It is a good real world example of what not to do with inheritance I guess, if they would only introduce it that way... |
| Thu 13 Mar | Chris Tavares | Toby Reyelts wrote: 'What you describe with Smalltalk is structural conformance. The problem with structural conformance is that the implementation details of a method are exposed to the user in order for them to discern the implicit interfaces of the methods parameters. It should be obvious that this is bad - especially for programming in the large. You can see the same problem with C++ templates, which are also based on structural conformance. ' I would disagree with this statement. My experience with templates in C++ and programming in Python (another language that uses what you call structural conformance) has been the exact opposite. Instead of introducing bunches of classes and interfaces that exist solely to get get around the type system, I can write more flexible code in fewer lines in less time. |
| Thu 13 Mar | apw | Square is a Rectangle, Rectangle is a Square?? hmm... I thought that squares and rectangles (along with parallelograms, trapezoids, and rhombuses) are *quadrilaterals*. |
| Thu 13 Mar | Toby Reyelts | Chris wrote:
'Instead of introducing bunches of classes and interfaces that exist solely to get get around the type system, I can write more flexible code in fewer lines in less time.'
Can you give an example of this 'more flexible code' and 'bunches of classes and interfaces' of which you speak?
// A C++ function that adds two objects
template |
| Thu 13 Mar | Chris Tavares | Yes, but you're using templates - the very thing you complained about in your previous message! I've got no problem with templates (well, no problem other than that the syntax gets overly complicated when used for template metaprogramming, but that's a whole different discussion). So, how would this example look in C++ WITHOUT templates? Let's take the example you give - adding two objects. Well, you'd need to have each object implement an Add method of some sort. So we have: IAddable Add( IAddable a, IAddable b ) { return a.Add( b ); } Ok, we've just implemented IAddable strictly so that we could sandwich various types into the system. It doesn't matter that Point, Rect, and Complex all implement operator+ already - to be used with this method, the parameters MUST be derived from IAddable. (Not to mention the problems C++ will have with object slicing and the return value here. Pretend it's Java instead. :-) ) And suppose now we want to subtract two objects as well? Well, I suppose we'd do: ISubtractable Sub( ISubtractable a, ISubstractable b ) { return a.Sub( b ); } Fairly simple. Now, we want to combine the two, say to calculate ( a + b ) / ( a - b ). ISomething Calculate( IAddableAndSubtractable a, IAddableAndSubtractable b ) { ... } We've now added a whole bunch of arbitrary interfaces to work around the fact that the type system requires a matching VTBL rather than matching via method signature. I hope you see my point here. Templates makes this problem go away. Signature based polymorphism (like Smalltalk or Python) makes this go away. Wether it complains at run time or compile time is a different issue really. You claim that compile time errors are better; I claim that compile time checking is overrated. I'm willing to let that argument go; I doubt we'll be able to convince each other. |
| Thu 13 Mar | Dennis Atkins | Regarding this square rectangle thing, it's perfectly OK to ADD RESTRICTIONS when creating a subclass. Maybe this exapmle will help: Example: PERSON. MAN is a type of PERSON and is an appropriate subclass. WOMAN is a type of PERSON and is an appropriate subclass. WOMAN has method giveBirth(). MAN does not have method giveBirth(). *So* giveBirth() should *not* be a method of PERSON, but of WOMAN only. Now, SetWidth and SetHeight separately does not make sense for square. But you could add the restriction to square that setting either one also sets the other one. Or you could derive square and rectangle from a common parent, which is probably a better solution. |
| Thu 13 Mar | Dennis Atkins | I'm with apw on the quadrilateral thing, that was the word I couldn't remember for the parent class. |
| Thu 13 Mar | .- / --. ..- -.-- | Adding a method to a subclass is not a restriction. If you study programming with contracts, you will see that one of the key consistency rules is that subclasses must honor the contracts of their superclasses. If you write a contract correctly, it states what the value of each basic function on a class' public interface will be when you call a procedure. The square/rectangle example would fail this test. It would resemble something like this: class Rectangle method SetHeight(pHeight long) preconditions: ... mHeight = pHeight postconditions: GetHeight = pHeight GetWidth = old.GetWidth The square could not honor this contract and also honor the constraint that its width and height are equal. |
| Thu 13 Mar | Toby Reyelts | Chris wrote: 'Yes, but you're using templates - the very thing you complained about in your previous message! I've got no problem with templates...' Sorry, I think we've managed to cross wires here. You complained that Java interfaces were a hack, I said they weren't. I described how C++ templates provide the structural conformance you're looking for in Smalltalk. I complained about how structural conformance (both in Smalltalk and C++ templates) exposes implementation details. You did not address that issue. So, to recap, what I'm saying is that the static typing, interfaces, and single inheritance that you lament in Java is elegant, is unrelated to the structural conformance you miss from Smalltalk, and the lack of structural conformance is more elegantly solved in statically typed languages through a generic mechanism. Aside from that, I believe people would be better served if the generic mechanism required type constraints, because it would prevent the exposure of implementation details that occurs with structural conformance. Essentially, if Java were to go with something like PolyJ, you'd be able to write compile-time type safe generic methods that don't expose implementation details. Much better than Smalltalk, and unrelated to interfaces, etc... God bless, -Toby Reyelts |
| Fri 14 Mar | Robin Debreuil | If I would see a shape class, in an actual program, that went Shape>Polygon>Quad>Rect>Square I would call that a very bad design and inheritance gone wrong, wouldn't you? What if someone casts a square to a polygon for a single instruction - then what? At very least you are creating far more work than you are saving. As for catching bugs at compile time or runtime, I agree it isn't that big of difference - it is the ones that you don't catch at runtime that hurt. I my experience non-typed languages allow a lot more of those through by their nature. |
| Fri 14 Mar | Ged Byrne | The whole square/quadrilateral/rectangle problem highlights one of the weaknesses with inheritance. Objects invariably belong in more than one set. Here we have three sets: Polygon, Regular Polygon and Quadrilateral. Regular Polygon and Quadrilateral are both sub sets of Polygon. There is an intersection of Quadrilateral and Regular Polygon – Square. Regular Polygon also contains non-quadrilaterals such as equilateral triangle. The whole thing is confused because we are using the inconsistent naming of mathematicians – why not call a square an equilateral rectangle? So in the design stage it has to be decided what the priorities are. Rectangle as an abstraction of Square? Square and Rectangle as siblings on the inheritance tree? No square class at all, just an IsRegular method for all polygons? This all depends on the purpose of the object model. For me this was one of the key things to grasp before finally understanding OO. My naïve approach was to try to model reality properly, and then reap the benefits from my extra effort. Truth is that OO just doesn’t provide the tools to model reality that accurately. You still have to make choices and trade offs when drawing up the design. |
| Fri 14 Mar | Practical geezer | Ged, You have just opened the door to an even messier subject, multiple inheritance. In the real world, objects are not part of any hierarchy whatsoever. Hierarchies are a human invention, for classification purposes, and as has been pointed out, it depends on your purpose which classification you use. So, objects can belong to any classification hierarchy you choose, as long as it honors the rules of the classification system. Multiple inheritance can be used to support this, but sadly, multiple inheritance can be abused even more than inheritance alone. Still, both are good tools, provided that they're used correctly. Otherwise they'll come and bite you, eventually. |
| Fri 14 Mar | John Topley | 'In the real world, objects are not part of any hierarchy whatsoever.' There is a DNA hierarchy amongst living things. We share some DNA with yeast, for example. |
| Fri 14 Mar | Seth Gordon | Living things inherit traits from their parents, thus creating a hierarchy, because living things have ... well ... parents. The rest of the world is not always so well-organized. |
| Sun 16 Mar | Bella | Anyone who thinks Inheritance is interchangeable with Interfaces have no fucking clue what OO is about. Get youu head out of your ass and out of your textbook. when you code a real OO project,you will not need to ask these idiotic questions. |
| Sun 16 Mar | | Got a hangover, bella? |
| Sun 16 Mar | JW Peppah | Bodies are a contract of organs, which are a contract of tissues, which are a contract of cells, which are a contract of molecules, which are a contract of elements from the periodic table, which are a contract of atoms, which are a contract of elementary particles, which are a contract of subatomic particles, which are a contract of superstrings, which are a contract of dimensions of energy . . . looks like inheritance all the way. |
| Laptop recommendations? | Tue 11 Mar | Philo |
| Im looking for a new desktop replacement laptop to replace my current one. My requirements: 1600x1200 screen 1GB RAM 5400rpm hard drive All the other stuff (DVD, CD-RW, wireless) seem to be ubiquitous - the big three above seem to be the ones that knock most options out of the running. Dell offers this, but going from 512MB->1024MB is $800 (?!) My current favorite is Sager ( http://www.sagernotebook.com/ ) - $3000 for the perfect machine. But I wanted to canvas the folks here to make sure I wasnt missing someone. Philo |
| Tue 11 Mar | ODN | The trick to getting lots of RAM in a Dell laptop at a reasonable price is to buy it separately. It makes no sense to me, but you can save hundreds by getting a laptop with minimal RAM installed and ordering your 'real' RAM separately from Dell. You actually save money doing this, even BEFORE you resell your original RAM on eBay. Or you can buy your RAM from Crucial to save even more. The last time I was in the market for a similar configuration, the options boiled down to Dell or IBM. I hear Sony now has a good 1600x1200 screen on one of their machines, but I'm not sure about the other specs. I went with the Dell 8200 and haven't been disappointed. The UltraSharp 1600x1200 is the way to go. |
| Tue 11 Mar | Eric Debois | I dont know if these models are available with the specs you asked for, butthese are my two favorites right now: HP Omnibook 6200 is my 'mobile' laptop and its very sturdy. Ive had it for six months and I dragg it around every day and it still looks bascily new. Easy to handle. I think it has a P4 1.7. My stationary laptop is a fujisu-siemens Amilo. Its a consumer laptop, and its not as well put together as the hp, but as I dont move it much thats secondary. Its good bang for the buck, though the screen is not terribly well lit. |
| Tue 11 Mar | Stephen Jones | I second Eric's comments on the HP 6200; it's the first laptop I've really liked working with. It is underspecced for Philo's uses though, but if somebody else finds the odd one going at clearance prices it's well worth buying. I would think about getting a DVD rewriter. Toshiba now do them with their top of the range models. If you're using a laptop as your primary machine you really want to have a convenient way of backing up all data at one go. And if space is not a problem it might be worth thinking of having a desktop and a lower specced laptop; spend $1500 on each instead of $3000 on the one. |
| Tue 11 Mar | Philo | [nod] My desktop machine is fine. The problem is that lately I've been doing a *lot* of development on the road, and I prefer to work on a comfortable speedy machine. Philo |
| Tue 11 Mar | Yaniv | Take a look at: http://discuss.fogcreek.com/joelonsoftware/default.asp?cmd=show&ixPost=29169&ixReplies=28 for more. |
| Tue 11 Mar | Brian B. | You might want to check out the new Dell Inspiron 8500. It's got a wide aspect 15.4' display that supports a resolution of 1920x1200. |
| Tue 11 Mar | Kyralessa | Definitely buy your RAM from Crucial, not from Dell; you'll save 50% or more. I just did this recently with a laptop and spent $150 on 512MB instead of Dell's $314. So far as brand, I'd say think about lifetime, not just specs and price. I used to work in contract PC repair, and Dell had the best part-replacement scheme of anyone we contracted with (which also included HP, Compaq, Toshiba, Best Buy...). They really do get it there the next day if you call in the morning and need a part replaced, whereas with others it ranged from several days to who-knows-when. They also had a far better percentage of correct diagnoses on the first part replacement, and more knowledgeable techs when you had to call in. |
| Tue 11 Mar | Philip Dickerson | I don't own one, but the Sony GRX700 Series looks tempting, and a match to your requirements. Sony GRX700 as configured below - price $US2689.99 16.1” UXGA (1600x1200) LCD display Mobile Intel® Pentium® 4 2.2GHz-M 1024 MB DDR-SDRAM 60 GB hard drive CD-RW/DVD-ROM Combo Microsoft® Windows® XP Professional You can decrease the price by substituting, for example: 40 GB hard drive [subtract $180.00] 30 GB hard drive [subtract $210.00] Mobile Intel® Pentium® 4 1.8GHz-M [subtract $250.00] Mobile Intel® Celeron® 1.7GHz [subtract $410.00] You can increase the price/capability by substituting: DVD±RW/CD-RW combo with Click to DVD™ software [add $300.00] Mobile Intel® Pentium® 4 2.4GHz-M [add $300.00] More info at: http://www.sonystyle.com/is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfinity/eCS/Store/en/-/USD/SY_BrowseCatalog-Start?CatalogCategoryID=0.4KC0.NZxUAAADzvzpE.teE or start at: http://www.sonystyle.com (their specific links change periodically) |
| Tue 11 Mar | fool for python | Anything that runs OS X. |
| Tue 11 Mar | Eric W. Sink | Two points: 1. Read everything you can before buying a Sager. I cannot speak from experience, but I almost bought one several years ago. I talked myself out of it by reading the comments of those who have bought one. 2. I strongly recommend the IBM Thinkpad A31p. Over the years I've owned 12 different laptops, including Toshiba, Dell, Gateway, NEC and Sony. The bottom line is that Thinkpads are the best, and the A31p is the finest laptop I have ever used. |
| Tue 11 Mar | Prakash S | ODN, Kyralessa: Won't your warranty with Dell be void if you put in your RAM? Philo: After doing some more research on Laptops, I would say 1.) Go with a name brand model: Dell, IBM, Toshiba, etc. 2.) Get a 3 year warranty. 3.) Dell has the best customer service (not the greatest, but the best compared to the rest). best, |
| Wed 12 Mar | Prakash S | Kyralessa, I was checking up RAM prices for my laptop - $100 for 256 mb sounds good to me. Wanted to know if opening up a laptop doing an upgrade is easy? I have done it on PC's, but never on a laptop. FYI: My warranty ran out. THanks, |
| Wed 12 Mar | anonymous | On a laptop, spend until it really hurts and then keep it as long as you can make it make do. I have a Dell Precision m40, because I needed it a year ago. Nice machine, too expensive. It's built around the Latitude C800 series, which is a nicer and more robust platform than the Inspirons. Particularly, you get two PCMCIA slots and the nubby stick in the middle of the keyboard in addition to the touchpad. I'd go crazy if I had to use the touchpad. I just plain like the industrial design better, too. Make Dell sell you a Latitude. |
| Wed 12 Mar | Stephen Jones | It's even easier to put memory in a laptop. Normally you just take out the battery and open a slot at the bottom. Have a look at your manual. |
| Wed 12 Mar | Albert D. Kallal | Don’t forget a first rate warranty. I have owed at 4 notebooks,and EVERYONE of them has had some major failure (screen, or hard disk). I use my notebooks a lot, and in fact the finish on the last one actually wore off where my palms rest! My current keyboard was replaced under warranty, and is only a few months old, and again is showing real good signs of wear. In my previous notebook, the flat screen just stopped working. The cost of replacement was more then the notebook was worth! Of ALL my friends who also have notebooks, the ones that actually use/move the notebook (ie: it does not count if your notebook just sits at the office and never gets moved). I am talking about people who actually use, and need a notebook. That means it gets moved on a daily basis. If this is the case, then it will break with normal use. Just general wear and tear means your notebook WILL FAIL. I REPEAT every notebook I have has had some major failure. Every SINGLE one of the people I know have also had, or required warranty work if they are on the go all the time. A large portion of notebook users do NOT move the notebook everyday, and thus do not experience much failures at all. As a result, I now always have my notebook under warranty. It is has been a few months since dell rolled the truck to fix my notebook, but it is costing them a bundle, and not me. I strongly recommend that you get a very good warranty, and in fact purchase at least 3 years worth of warranty. I will restate this gain: I strongly recommend you get a VERY good warranty. With a desktop pc, you pull out parts and replace it. Dirt cheap, and disposable those desktop computers are. Besides, they don’t get moved, and thus there is not stress on the motherboards. With a notebook, a small failure will cost you big bucks. You need a warranty to use, and run a notebook. There is no other way around this. Albert D. Kallal Edmonton, Alberta Canada Kallal@msn.com |
| Wed 12 Mar | one programmer's opinion | I recently read that Sager is currently kicking Dell's butt on laptop prices. Note: I haven't verified this myself. As far as Dell is concerned. As others have already mentioned you should buy additional memory from a third party vendor such as Crucial. You will save yourself some money. Btw, adding more memory to your machine won't void your warranty. While comparison shopping make sure to check out various web sites for coupon deals. You should be able to find coupons deals for memory as well as the laptop itself. Just in case you don't know a coupon is -- a coupon is simply a discount code (i.e. ABC3457U might equal 10% off the purchase price) that you type into a particular web site during checkout time. Let us know what you wind up buying. |
| Wed 12 Mar | one programmer's opinion | '3.) Dell has the best customer service (not the greatest, but the best compared to the rest).' Prakash S, I realize that you are orginally from India so don't take this post as a personal attack against you. Imo, Dell's customer service currently sucks. Do a Google search if you don't believe me. I recently was looking to purchase a new desktop PC and all of the reviews that I read from Dell customers who recently purchased a PC I was interested in buying went something like this, 'great machine, but the customer service I received was simply awful'. Dell outsourced most of their customer service calls to an Indian firm a couple of years ago. |
| Wed 12 Mar | Yaniv | I have mentioned this in previous threades regarding buying new laptops. I was in the similar position looking for a desktop replacement notebook few months ago and I wanted the fastest, most powerfull notebook available in the market. Dell wasn't offering 2.8GHz notebooks then. Hence I looked at Sager, Pro-Star, Alienware etc. They all had machines with similar configuations. Alienware said it will take a month to deliver the machine. I went with a Pro-Star 5654 (P4 2.8GHz, 1GB RAM, 40GB Hard drive, 1600X1200 resolution) becuase of the better pricing. It was a big mistake. It's very heavy (12 pounds!), Everything is so small in 1600X1200 resolution, it really hurts the eyes and if I go to a lower resolution the display becomes blurry, battery life is horrible (1 hour max), Too much of heat generation! (I keep my coffee hot, I mean HOT, not just warm!, the whole day!). $2800 down the drain :( Think twice before buying a laptop with P4 desktop processor as opposed mobile processor (P4 M)! Just some food for thought! Let me know if any of you have any other opinion and agree or disagree with me. Thanks. |
| Wed 12 Mar | Philo | Albert, re: warranties - agreed. Also make sure you get an 'onsite' warranty. My first Dell was depot repair - the screen went bad while I was living off the laptop and they wanted it for two weeks to fix it; I couldn't even pay for the service visit - it was send it in or no warranty. (I ended up writing a letter to Michael Dell's office which got me a trade for a refurbished machine, with which I was very happy) Philo |
| Wed 12 Mar | Karl Perry | I'd go with Dell. I've had my Inspiron 8200 since September and I've very happy with it. Prior to that I owned a Micron TransPort Trek II for almost four years and was never happy with their service. Dell is constantly changing the 'specials' they offer, and many times they offer a 'double RAM' special. I was able to increase my memory from the 128MB standard to 512MB for about $75. No doubt you could do the same, and get Dell RAM. (I've also bought from Crucial and have been very happy both with price and their service.) I just checked their site and they don't currently offer that deal, but their specials change on Thursday - so check back tomorrow. Also, their inventory changes almost daily; at one point I had the opportunity to get double RAM AND a combo DVD/CDRW drive at an incredible deal, but wasn't quite ready ... I decided two days later it was too good of a deal to pass up, but when I checked the site the drive was no longer available. So when you find the combo you want at the right price, jump on it. As others have said, get the longest warranty you can, and make sure it's for on-site repair. A lot of my dissatisfaction with Micron was that the laptop had a manufacturing/design defect: its hinges were far too tight, and the plastic in the display portion of the case basically disintegrated about two years after I bought it. I spoke with several others with the identical problem. I had not purchased the extended warranty (unavailable since I bought a 'refurbished' unit), and it took me almost three months to get Micron to admit fault and fix the problem without cost (it would have been $400 otherwise). With the $300 extended warranty, it would have been a matter of calling them and telling them to fix it, and everything else would have been covered, too. Look both at their small-business and their home sites. Their prices for the identical computer on the two sites can be hundreds of dollars different. I find that their small-business pricing is much better. Also, be sure to continue to check their site AFTER you receive your machine. About 25 days after I received my new Inspiron I needed research a new laptop for a client, and out of curiosity I re-priced the configuration I bought. It was almost $300 less! I called Dell's customer service, and they credited me for the difference. You have to do this within 30 days of purchase. Finally, check the 1600x1200 resolution carefully. Have you worked with one of these displays yet? I have a friend with one, and found the characters were just too small for my 43-year-old eyes. He's a bit older than I, and thinks it's great. I compromised on the 1400x1050 display and have been very happy. Dell has by far and away the most choices available, and their product is very nice. I recommend them highly, despite Joel's opinion of their servers :) |
| Thu 13 Mar | Prakash S | Just bought additional RAM from Dell, it was $19 cheaper than what I found at Crucial's website. Customer service was pretty good, never had any complaints with Dell Service. |
| Thu 13 Mar | Chris Tavares | I recently bought a Sony Vaio R505 to replace my aging Z505. It doesn't meet the original poster's specs, so I wouldn't recommend it for him; I bought it because of the small size / light weight. But I just wanted to comment. I seriously thought about a Dell laptop. I know several people who own them, and swear by them. And they all said the same thing: 'Yeah, and the Dell service was great the three/four times I had to send it in for repair!' My first Vaio went for 3 years without a hitch. Dells seem to need major or minor repairs every six months in my experience. |
| Sun 16 Mar | James Ussher-Smith | In May last year I got a Sony PCG-GRX316MP (P4 1.6GHz, 512MB, 30GB, 16.1' screen) and couldn't be happier with it. I would definitely recommend Sony's latest model which I believe has already been mentioned earlier in the thread. |
| Going from on-line contact to face-to-face | Sat 15 Mar | Alex Chernavsky |
| I admit to having anti-socialist tendencies. Left to my own devices, I tend to sit in my basement in front of the computer. However, a new service has recently improved my social life. http://www.meetup.com/ is a great idea. Basically, this website unites people who share a common interest, and helps organize face-to-face meetings among these people. Meetup.com was profiled in a recent article in the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/13/technology/circuits/13meet.html Ive been to three Meetup.com meetings so far (I live in Rochester, NY), and all three were pretty good. I thought Id bring it to peoples attention here, in case anyone else was interested. (Other than being a user, I have no connection to Meetup.com.) |
| Sat 15 Mar | sgf | Yeah, I hate the Socialists too, high taxes and all that. :) |
| Design and implementation as separate roles | Fri 14 Mar | ODN |
| From the recent CAMEL discussion, Nat Ersoz said It will be a cold day in hell when I code something that someone else architected. Likewise, if I have to write the spec, then I might as well spend the remaining part of the day writing the code. Ive traditionally taken the same design-to-code-in-one-day approach as Nat, but am considering taking a new job with clear separation between the design role and the implementation role. My job would be to do the design and then hand it over to an on-site contractor to implement. At first, I worried that Id miss the satisfaction of coding my own designs, but the more I think about it, the more I like the thought of not having to shift gears so much. Because I would do less transitioning from high-level to low-level, I could actually get more done, and have a more focused, comprehensive approach to development. As Ive practiced honing my design skills in preparation for this possible job, Ive noticed that having to put down on paper trivial things where I would traditionally have jumped straight into code helps me to spot conceptual gotchas a lot sooner. Of course this level of rigor comes at a cost. What are your thoughts on the kinds of projects that justify this degree of separation, and what are issues to look out for when different people have different roles? (The cold day in hell response, etc.) |
| Fri 14 Mar | matt | Often, designers will create a reference implementation of their design to prove that it is implementable. I know the W3C won't release a spec as final until there are at least n (can't remember the number) implementations. On a separate note, I have heard Steve McConnell talk about this (apparently, MS did it for a while with Master and Slave Coders) and he says it's horrible for morale. Well, for the slaves anyway. |
| Fri 14 Mar | Big B | I read Nat's 'remaining part of the day' more as a figure of speech than as switching roles on the same day. When I work on a new subsystem, I spend 30-50% of the time planning before I write any production code at all. This sometimes goes on for a couple of weeks or more. Then I switch roles and write code most of the time. I imagine if I had to hand over my spec to a coder, I'd have to spend much longer on it, because there are many details I don't need to put in there because they don't concern anyone else but me as a programmer and architect. The good thing about having two separate people working on the system is that two heads think better than one. But given the fact nobody wants to be a code slave, and it only makes the architect's job more cumbersome, I'd prefer two all-round developers. |
| Fri 14 Mar | Nat Ersoz | Well, yes, I used some exageration - it was to make a point. I often code to a specification - in fact most of my work is that way. I have hardware data sheets from a manufacturer, and I have ITU, ISO and IETF standards/RFC's to code to (among others as well). So I'm no stranger to coding to something defined outside of my own realm. However, these are not software architecture designs by individuals in secret rooms. They are open standards designed by comitee. This is something completely different that having some architects appointed within a corporate structure with the intent of telling someone what to do. Additionally, it should be expected that individuals will have skills that are specialized and will be more proficient within a certain context than others. Each individual should be taking part in the design discussion, especially when they are known to be skilled in a specific art. I'll put forth the hypothesis that any engineer will to be a code slave is not worth having on a team. That certainly has been my experience. |
| Fri 14 Mar | ODN | Nat, I think we're coming from very different business areas. Business software design can be a lot less straight-forward than things that have clear-cut standards to code to. If I'm implementing networking protocols for a wireless device, I would expect as a coder to understand far more about the big picture than if I were coding part of a huge line-of-business application. I would also expect to participate more in design discussion as a networking programmer than as a business programmer. I would be far more likely to refer to coders on a networking device project as engineers than I would coders on a line-of-business project. Working as a coder on a large line-of-business project would probably drive someone with the 'engineering mind' bonkers. There's a valid place for both kinds of programmers in this world, but it's often hard for people on one side of the fence to understand that about the guys on the other side. |
| Sat 15 Mar | one programmer's opinion | Hi ODN, Let me turn the tables and ask you a question -- What are your thoughts about this position? The following are questions that I would like to know something more about before commenting on your question: * What type of design work are we talking about here? Modeling large object-oriented business systems? * Is design work going to be your ONLY responsibility? What about analysis and requirements work? * Does the company have enough 'new development' work in the pipeline to keep you busy for the next couple of years? * What tools and technologies are you expected to know/use? * Have you ever designed a large 'corporate enterprise' business system before? What I mean is do you feel you are qualified to do this type of work? My only comment for now is -- If I was looking to specialize in something, I don't think I could ask for a better job than what you might be doing soon. Let us know what how things turn out for you. |
| Sat 15 Mar | ODN | In answer to OPO's questions: My thoughts on the position are basically that it is my ideal job if I'm actually able to perform. But if I can't perform then I shouldn't waste their time and mine. It's a tough call to make because it's not an easy job for me to to quantify from what I've been able to learn so far. I would say the design work involves small to mid-size object-oriented business systems. But they expect several of them to be on my plate at once, with an eye toward eventually creating one unified system from some of them. There will be requirements gathering and analysis in addition to design, but I chose 'design' as the representative word to keep the discussion as down-to-earth as possible, given some people's aversion to anything remotely related to the word 'architect'. From the plans they've talked about, there is no shortage of projects for the foreseeable future, from SCADA to maintenance management to accounting and everything in between. They seem quite dedicated to staying cutting-edge, and perform extensive analysis of new technologies as they arrive. New development is currently focused on .NET with Oracle back-ends, but they have some Java and other technologies in their past, and they aren't afraid to change gears quickly, which I believe is part of the reason they contract out almost all implementation. They haven't emphasized any particular development methodology. In fact they've emphasized that they really feel that software development is more of an art than a science, and therefore value people who have a good intuition more than they value a particular brand of methodologist. As long as you're able to produce, it doesn't matter how you get there. We did cover software engineering and project management topics fairly extensively, and I think we see eye-to-eye for the most part, but I would probably have a fair bit of leeway as far as design tools and techniques. I haven't designed a large business system before as far as big-bang design goes, but I did spend several years iteratively designing and building a mid-size system that nobody knew was going to grow to deal with all the different business areas that it did. I would say it ended up being enterprise-wide in scope by the time it was done. It was in a similar line of business as the new job opportunity. One of the non-technical things that appeals to me is the opportunity to specialize in a business that deals with a wide range of roles, from the maintenance mechanic to the engineer to the more traditional information worker types. I think working to meet the technology needs of that range of people in a unified way is a great opportunity to grow. |
| Sat 15 Mar | Patrik | This idea of splitting design and implementation roles has a few major drawbacks as I see it. Most large corporations have their share of designated 'system architects' or 'database architects' or what you want to call them. For the sake of the argument they are all designers. Then, you have a buch of coders, that code from given specs. If you come in as a new coder and you are spoonfed completed specs you can not easily build up a full understanding of your platform, because you never get to excersise it to the fullest. Its when you design complete solutions, and then implement them you really learn the ways of working on a given platform, and a given tool. This being a designated coder maybe works for relatively inexperienced coders, that are just starting to work professionally. Also, if you have a group of designated designers that do specs, they sometimes seem to justify bad design descisions with being 'superior' to coders. With database designers for example, having done tons of DB2 stuff does not automatically make you a good designer for Oracle. The way the databases handle non-trivial stuff differs. The design of a new system is always a series of tradeoffs, and if the person doing the design is not very proficient with the tools/platform being used you are in for surprises. I have seen cases where the coders would make better designers than designers because they have a better hands on experience with things. I think working together and taking the best design that can be thought up between designers and coders, is what is going to work best. Either split things up, or have the designated designers take part in the implementation process as well. A designer of a system is not finished working when the spec is done. |
| Sat 15 Mar | ODN | I'm not sure what I've been saying that's giving off the large company vibe, but the job I'm talking about is in an IT department that I'm guessing has less than a dozen people in it, including management, network admins, and DBAs. They seem to have made a conscious effort to keep themselves lean and mean despite ongoing application development work. I believe this is the exact opposite of the type of place that people are characterizing when they put double-quotes around the word 'architect'. If I were to take this position, I would do my best to involve the programmers in any relevant design decisions and definitely in time estimates, but because they're all contractors there's an extra layer of separation I'm not used to dealing with. They have some truly brilliant programmers working for them, so I'd like to find ways for them be as involved as possible. Perhaps I'm seeing the separation of roles as more drastic than it actually is, but if it really is that clean-cut then I need to find a way to deal with it. |
| Sat 15 Mar | Patrik | ODN, Maybe separation works if done right, maybe I have just seen poor implementations. Nothing you said really led me to believe you were talking about a big company. My experience led me to that, because when I worked for smaller outfits (10-30 people), I have not seen this splitting done to the extreme. Ofcourse even the smaller places had people that were given titles along the lines of Senior Develper, Lead Programmer, Designer and what have you, but this was mainly just titles. We were working as a team always, and whats important is that the most informed member of the team is making the descision for a given design issue. In other places I have seen developers are forbidden to make design descisions, add a table, talk to the DBA. Add a field in the table, justify that change with the DB designer - I can understand that some companies enforce such strict rules in their production systems, but when applied to development, this leads to territorial fights and is harmful. I guess its simply a matter of how you implement the system. After thinking for 30 seconds, the key rule seems to be that the most informed person in the team should make the descision. May seem like this almost goes without saying, but the role separation is malpracticed in some places. |
| Sat 15 Mar | Joe AA. | Sure... the larger the group and the more the group fragments into titles of speciality and the greater the social prestige of those titles, the more dysfunctional the group becomes. The greatest dysfunction occurs when the group adds to its numbers just to continue its existance (e.g. job security illusion). The distribution of responsibility for something like design and implementation is not necessarily bad by itself, but becomes so when 'conceptual intergrity' as defined by Fred Brooks becomes impossible to achieve. At this point, all projects and implementations can rightly be called failures. |
| Sat 15 Mar | anon | From the point of view of the business, you have to understand the economics of the organizational scheme you choose. It does no good to say 'specialization is best!' or 'generalizing is best!!' or any of that until you understand your goals. Each kind of organization is designed to optimize some goal. If you choose what is usually called 'the functional team' approach, you choose specialization as your primary organizing principle. You have a bunch of finance people on the team called 'finance' and you have a bunch of engineers on the team called 'engineering.' Similarly, if you choose the purley cross functional approach, where you have autonomous teams staffed with a variety of skillsets, you are choosing generalization, or breadth, as your primary organizing principle. The first kind of organization strives for efficiency of each functional unit though economies of scale within the unit. The tradeoff is that this kind of organization is relatively slow due to relatively lean communication links between the functional areas and lack of visibility across the areas. The second kind of organization strives for speed. This comes at the cost of reduced quality (in general) and inefficiency. Recently, hybrid teams have resulted in what's called 'matrix organizations.' These posses either the best qualities of each of the other types or (more often?) the worst. If you are a business, you need to decide what your goal will be and organize your resources accordingly. When you are choosing how to develop your skills, you have to look at the market for each of these kinds of organizations and plan accordingly. Assuming, of course, that your main goals are economic. |
| Terms | Fri 14 Mar | Jay |
| Can someone please explain the following terms for me? Strategies vs Tactics vs logistics I am looking for definitive answer. Thanks |
| Fri 14 Mar | RocketJeff | The Merriam-Webster dictionary is at http://webster.com/ |
| Fri 14 Mar | anon | Strategy is about goal selection, tactics is about the methods you use to achieve the goals, and logistics is about the process that controls the tactics. |
| Sat 15 Mar | Nat Ersoz | Tactical strateegery synergisticly complements the logistical global dynamic paradigm. Usually, Webster's definitions matter little when these words are used... |
| Sat 15 Mar | Herbert Sitz | The technical meaning of these terms has its origin in military matters. Here's my understanding of it: The big distinction between 'strategy' and 'tactics' has to do with scale. 'Strategy' has to do with overarching decisions that are fairly general in nature. Doesn't describe how to do something, but decides what is going to be done. E.g., 'We're going to fight this war on two fronts.' 'Tactics' have to do with the particular method of accomplishing smaller scale items. E.g., 'To take over that position we'll first soften them up with cannons and then rush them and use hand-to-hand combat with bayonets.' Generals study and decide strategy. Lower level soldiers study tactics. Tactics are used to execute the strategy decided upon by the generals. Logistics has to do with the shuffling around of resources from place to place. Not sure how it relates to strategy and tactics, exactly. I would think that depending on their scale logistics decisions could be either strategic or tactical. As related to software, 'strategy' is obviously closely related to the overall architecture of a project. Tactics would have more to do with specific implementations. In the current thread about 'design and implementation as separate roles', the 'design' can be thought of as 'strategic', the 'implementation' as 'tactical'. If you want, you can think of the software architects as the generals and the coders as the grunt solders. ;) |
| Laptop OS upgrade (XP home to pro) | Fri 14 Mar | tim |
| Ive got a Dell Inspiron 8100 running XP Home Edition and I want to upgrade to XP Pro. Ive got a XP Pro cd (gotta love MS Campus Agreements) but Im wary of making the switch. Im just worried that something will go horribly awry and Ill have to wipe the drive and start from scratch. Anyone have any tips or things to note before I bite the bullet and upgrade? Also, Im assuming that Ill have to reinstall all my software. Is this correct? I know that ME (yuck) didnt require this when upgrading/downgrading (depending on your pov) from 98. Anyone? Thanks for your help. |
| Fri 14 Mar | John Conners | I've done exactly what you're considering and it was almost painless. For some reason it reset the start menu so all the shortcuts to all the software I'd installed disappeared. If you make a copy of them you shouldn't have the pain I did reconfiguring them. Aside from that it ran a treat and everything still worked. |
| Fri 14 Mar | Wei | should not be a problem... i've upgraded home to pro without any issues, not even the shortcuts thingy mentioned. just curious? why the upgrade? home is fine, it's not like you need multi-processor, multi-monitor support on a laptop rite? given a choice i'd just stick to win2k sp3... it's really stable and running great. =) |
| Fri 14 Mar | Li-fan Chen | If your laptop has a CD burner just zip up your favorites and everything in your 'My Documents' (or My Music or My Pictures or My Microsoft Bob whaever) folder and burn it. |
| Fri 14 Mar | Li-fan Chen | I am a great fan of SP3, but SP2 has slightly less compatibility for me. I have had some incompatibility problems. On the gaming side I tend to stay with DirectX 8.1 Final.. you'll want to back up these old Service Packs because it gets really hard to find them (time consuming) in Microsoft's huge website. |
| Fri 14 Mar | Li-fan Chen | Oopps.. said it opposite. I meant SP2 is more compatible with the various software I install. Try SP2, and go to SP3 only if you need all of the hot fixes really badly. |
| Fri 14 Mar | Philip Dickerson | Also read these Microsoft KB articles: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;[LN];Q312369 http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;[LN];Q312368 http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;[LN];Q315341 One of these explains why the Start menu items might disappear during the upgrade if XP Home was pre-installed by the manufacturer. |
| Fri 14 Mar | Philip Dickerson | Regarding why upgrade to XP Professional, for me the biggest reason would be that IIS is only in the Professional edition - if you use your system for developing ASP or ASP.NET applications/sites/pages it's really useful to have a local IIS on your system. Other significant features that are only in XP Professional that may be of interest are (some of which are mentioned in earlier replies): multi-processor support, multi-monitor, multi-language, Windows domain networking, encrypting file system, remote desktop. |
| Fri 14 Mar | Duncan Smart | Check out the 'File and Settings Transfer Wizard' in Accessories/System Tools too -- works rather well. |
| Fri 14 Mar | flamebait sr. | It's much better if you are prepared to rebuild your system from scratch at any moment, anyway. So make sure you have backups and all of the installers for any software you want and just stop worying about it. |
| Fri 14 Mar | ODN | I did the XP Home to XP Pro upgrade on my brother's new Dell 8200 laptop. I had originally intended to reformat and do a clean install, but decided to go with the upgrade process that popped up when I stuck the CD in, just for kicks. It worked great, and left all the programs in perfect working order, as well as the Start menu intact. I have a friend with XP Home who I helped install IIS 5 on his computer from some Windows 2000 MSDN cds. It's not supported, but can be done. Search Google Groups for instructions. It works for some things, but ASP.NET doesn't play well with it, so I'm considering doing the XP Pro upgrade route, but am afraid that with the nonstandard IIS install, it might hose it. I seriously doubt anyone here has gone this route, but on the off chance someone has, does it work? |
| Fri 14 Mar | Wayne | >>multi-processor, multi-monitor support on a laptop rite? Actually, multi-monitor in *any* computer can boost your efficiency by 100%, since you then have 100% more screen to work with. Let me tell you a little story. I worked for a guy that /insisted/ that everyone in the office used dual screen. At the time I was a ferocious youth and argued with him terribly about everything. Eventually though, I came around and now I insist on it in my office. Even when I go on site to a client's location, if there's an extra monitor around, I use it. You can just *see* everything that much better. Furthermore, Windows XP Pro handles dual monitor better than all versions of Windows. |
| Sat 15 Mar | Tim Miller | Thanks for the replies. As to the why? I'm hoping to use my laptop as my test system for learnign ASP.net, sql, etc, and as was mentioned, IIS not available in home. Also, I discovered while working on a Java assignment that it would be nice to be running IIS while not networked so I can avoid IOExceptions when testing apps that look up URLs. Anyways, thanks again for the info. |
| Joel on Writing | Thu 13 Mar | Beka Pantone |
| As of late I have been working on a field where little knowledge is committed to print. I keep playing around with the idea of writing a book on the subject. Unfortunately I know nothing about the publishing industry or the process involved in writing a book. As the existence of this book attests http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1893115941/ref%3Dnosim/joelonsoftware/104-4688036-0936749 Joel has been there and done that. I would very much enjoy reading an account from Joel on how software developers become book authors. From the idea to the shelves. Do you need an agent to get a publisher? Does the publisher assign you an editor? What is your relationship with the editor? Is it required to physically meet your editor on a regular basis or can it all be done through email? (might be relevant to people that doesnt live in cities) Does the author have a say on the format of the book? Things such as cover design, page format, graphic plates, typography, etc. Does content evolve as you write or does it have to be set in stone before you get a publishing deal? What tools are used in the writing of a book? Are you expected to deliver in a particular document format? Do you have to get the proofreaders yourself or do you get some assigned? Is the book delivered all at once? Or is the writing/feedback process iterative? The whole publishing industry is a complete mistery to me, so if anybody has any experience Id be delighted to hear about it, for I will certainly learn from it. |
| Thu 13 Mar | Beka Pantone | Erm... of course a basic step would be to check for spelling mistakes. That should have read 'mystery' instead of 'mistery'. :) |
| Thu 13 Mar | Mike Swieton | My suggestion, call up a publisher or two and ask. This presumes that you need a publisher, of course, which isn't necessarily the case (my dad prints out lab books for the course he teaches, but it's a bit easier to sell books when the audience must by them). I haven't written anything, but I imagine that if a publisher wants a book on the subject, they should at least be willing to spend the time to tell you about their process (which is almost certainly very similar to every other publisher's process). |
| Thu 13 Mar | TK | The CityDesk forum mentions a successful use of iUniverse: http://discuss.fogcreek.com/CityDesk/default.asp?cmd=show&ixPost=5584&ixReplies=8 Make sure the read the bottom posts. |
| Thu 13 Mar | Beka Pantone | Technical details such as the document format (although mentioned in my initial post) do not worry me in the least, I would think that this is the easiest problem to overcome. My post intended to encourage Joel to write about 'how he got around writing his book', from the idea to the bookstore. I would enjoy reading what he discovered along the way. I assumed that perhaps someone else in this forum might be interested in reading such thing, or write about it (if they have an experience to share). |
| Fri 14 Mar | Justin | Wrox press have some blurb on their site for potential authors. You might also look the 'Re:The book' part of Critical Section at http://www.w-uh.com (a link a came across a couple of days ago somewhere else on this forum). Something written about by Joel was the 'fire and motion' tactic (strategy?). It applies in this case in the sense that you shouldn't allow a few more days to slip by without making some...*any* progress towards your goal of a book. Even if its just notes. The longest journey begins with a single step (or some such platitude). I, of course, do not follow my own advice and have successfully never started writing a book over the course of 15 years. |
| Fri 14 Mar | Simon Lucy | Its a crowded market these days. If you have a good niche subject, good direct experience which is going to make you standout from the rest, do a synopsis of the book, no more than a page. You have to sell the idea to get the contract. Technical books aren't quite like trying to sell a novel (not that I've done the latter), technical publishers tend to have very good ideas as to what they want to publish. They are also unlikely to pick up a finished book. Hence the synopsis. |
| Fri 14 Mar | r-pt | you should read this page http://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/dead-trees/story.html it has some insights about the publishing process. |
| Fri 14 Mar | Brent P. Newhall | As a writer and ex-editor, I can answer this. :-) Here's the typical process, assuming an author has written a book: The author chooses a publisher to submit the book to. The author looks on the publisher's website for submission guidelines; if there are none, the author checks a copy of The Writer's Market, a massive book available at any bookstore or library. The publisher may only accept submissions from agents, in which case the author can't do anything unless s/he has an agent. The publisher may accept only query letters, or may accept a cover letter along with a few sample chapters. Assuming the publisher accepts non-agented query letters, the author then writes a query letter to the publisher, essentially saying, 'I've written a book on this subject, that covers this information. Here's why the book should sell like crazy. Here are my credentials. Please consider it for publication.' The author then sends the query letter -- along with a self-addressed, stamped envelope -- to the publisher, and waits to hear a reply. Assuming the publisher accepts non-agented cover letters with sample chapters, the author writes a cover letter, essentially saying, 'Included is the first few chapters from a book on this subject, that covers this information. Here's why the book should sell like crazy. Here are my credentials. Please consider it for publication.' The author then formats the sample chapters according to the publisher's submission guidelines and sends this stuff -- along with a self-addressed, stamped envelope -- to the publisher, and waits to hear a reply. Realistically: The author then gets rejected, submits to another publisher, and repeats the process many times. That's just the way of the industry. Then the author gets a reply letter! A publisher is interested. The author then formats the entire book according to the publisher's submission guidelines, and sends it. An editor reads it over, and replies with a final yea/nay (at this point, a 'nay' is unlikely), along with a request for changes such as re-arranging the ordering of parts of the text, tweaking examples, etc. The author then sends the full manuscript with changes, which then goes through a big process involving many people at the publisher: proofreader, typesetter, etc. Then the book is published. Here are answers to specific questions: Your relationship with the editor is ideally a friendly business relationship. The editor already likes your book, so your relationship should be friendly. The editor may ask you for changes, and some folks get ticked off by this, but it's the editor's job to know the market and book format so s/he can advise you on what will work best. Any changes are requested in the spirit of helping your book to sell as many copies as possible. You should never have to physically meet with your editor. Most authors never physically meet their editors. The author usually does not have a say in the format of the book, because those decisions are best left to those who've been trained to make those decisions. You can certainly request things, but don't count on them being followed. The content will typically evolve, once a publisher has shown interest. The tools are: one (1) word processor. That's it. There is a standard format, yes. The fundamental standard for pretty much all printed work is to format the work in a fixed-width font (like Courier, not Times), double-spaced, with page numbers at the top. Text that you intend to put in italics should be underlined instead. Otherwise, formatting should be kept to an absolute minimum, since the document will be re-formatted into the publisher's format anyway. Each publisher will have specific formatting requirements; again, check their website or The Writer's Market. Proofreaders are assigned; you won't have to worry about that. However, you should strive to write a manuscript that won't need proofreaders. Feel free to post or e-mail with further questions; I'll be happy to reply with what I know. |
| Fri 14 Mar | B# | Brent Which begs the question: 'Do you have a link to your book(s) or article(s)? Thanks |
| Fri 14 Mar | Jeff Linwood | I can add a little to Brent's (I've co-authored a software programming book, and I've done some technical reviewing/editing on books). Usually for software writing you haven't written the book before you sell it, because when you sell it, it will have to match the publisher's guidelines for the series, their formats, etc. The publisher (through the acquisitions editor) will sort through all of the proposals, try and figure out what book people will want to buy a year or a year and a half from now, what the competition is, that sort of thing. I've never met my editors, it's all email and phone calls. It's a really crowded field though, so you'll have to come up with something original, of course, if it is too new, no one will want to buy the book, and on and on. |
| Fri 14 Mar | Jeff Linwood | Generally speaking, proofreaders and technical editors are assigned, you probably don't get any real control of the title or the cover or the layout, as each publisher has their own styles and covers already (maybe O'Reilly lets you pick the animal) |
| Fri 14 Mar | Danil | Mark Pilgrim's solution was to blog his book. |
| Fri 14 Mar | wannabe writer | What about copyright issues? Isn't it possible that when the publisher gets the mauscript he can say no to you and start working on a similar book. What can I do to prevent the publisher to steal my idea? |
| Fri 14 Mar | e | Realistically, that's a risk you have to run, unless you're dealing with fiction, where it would be easier to establish that a creative idea was actually stolen. Publishers get 1,000s of ideas and submissions, mostly from people who grossly overrate their writing ability and the likely prospects of their proposed book. Philip Greenspun has a very perceptive comment, based on his own publishing experience: he realised that publishing is a business that exists to pay the wages of editors, managers, designers and book sellers, not authors. |
| Sat 15 Mar | Stephen Jones | ---'Isn't it possible that when the publisher gets the mauscript he can say no to you and start working on a similar book.'--- Mail a copy to yourself and leave it unopened. Many countries such as Spain have official registries. Remember that you as the author represent a small part of the total cost of the book. It's too much trouble for an editor just to steal your basic idea, and anything else opens him to a charge of plagiarism. |
| 3 Forgetful Ladies | Thu 13 Mar | Bob |
| Alright, I should say taht my mother didnt let me laugh of old people, but the idea is still... an idea (if its not a funny joke). Actually its 2 ladies: Lady1: Lady2, are you going to the fruit market? Lady2: No, Im going to the fruit market. Lady1: Oh, I thought that youre going to the fruit market. (Sorry about the naming... :) |
| Thu 13 Mar | B# | Those 'ladies' wouldn't by any chance represent something else, like... say... Pints of Guiness? Would they? |
| Thu 13 Mar | Marcos M. Rubinelli | This reminds me of a mathematician trying to tell a bedtime story: 'Let there be a wolf W and three pigs P1, P2, and P3...' And I'm sorry to say there is prior art, so you won't be able to patent this joke. The differences are cosmetical: they are male, one of them is going to fish, and they have hearing, not memory problems. |
| Thu 13 Mar | Bob | I should add that the above discussion took place in fruit market... It wasn't about joking, I referred to what Joel wrote about his bank's slow web site, that he feels like an old forgetful lady. I wanted to add a different kind of forgetful lady. Joel's ladies want to take out the trash or to go to the grocery, but my ladies are here to talk crap, or anything. People like crap, heat, hate, and sometimes a good laugh too. That's why they go to Slashdot, I guess. But Joel didn't want that. |
| Fri 14 Mar | Li-fan Chen | In times of bad economy do you guys suppose the agencies have all the advantages? They seems to be the only one promising to be able to sift through thousands upon thousands of resumes no one can read through. Sometimes I feel so bad for these poor companies in desperate need to sift through the hay that I wish two paragraphs, 8 frames of powerpoint, or a 1 minute video is all job seekers ever submit. -- David |
| Fri 14 Mar | Duncan Smart | What on earth are you all going on about? |
| Sat 15 Mar | Bob | I don't know if David's post was related so much, but I was talking about Joel article Building Communities with Software http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BuildingCommunitieswithSo.html |
| MyYahoo alternatives | Thu 13 Mar | S |
| Ive been using http://my.yahoo.com for getting my morning news but lately it has gotten pretty bad. Before, when I logged in to Yahoo Messenger, it automatically logged me in to myyahoo. Now I have to do it in 2 steps. Also whenever I start a new browser window, I have to log in again. More recently, lot of their news links dont work. I have also noticed that many times the stories dont match the images they show. Anyone can recommend another web portal I can use for my news? I need World News (not just US), Canadian News, Hockey News, Stock Quotes for the symbols I am interested in, and Motorsports news. The rest is gravy. Thanks |
| Thu 13 Mar | Nathan | i've started using http://news.google.com/ and i've been very happy with it. i'm not sure if it would fit your customization needs though... |
| Thu 13 Mar | Prakash S | I second google news ++ keep listening to EDGE or MOJO Radio:-) for the hockey:-) |
| Thu 13 Mar | Bob | http://www.myway.com that is. |
| Thu 13 Mar | pb | Are you using the Same My Yahoo that I am? My Yahoo will save your log in so you never have to. And I've never seen a bad link to any of the news stories. |
| Thu 13 Mar | S | Well I am using http://my.yahoo.com I just noticed the bad links are for any Canadian news and not for others so that's probably why you have never seen it. It used to work fine. As far as the loging in is concerned, I see that if I click on th e 'Remember my ID & Password' then you don't have to log in ever but I don't like that. It used to work with messenger. If I signed out of messenger (when I go home or if I signed on somewhere else) than I would be signed out here. That prevents people from reading mystuff. Maybe I should contact yahoo and complain. Bob, thanks for the MyWay link. I just tried it and it looks pretty nice (well almost a carbon copy of my yahoo). Unfortunately, no Canadian news source. :( |
| Thu 13 Mar | RocketJeff | >>Maybe I should contact yahoo and complain. I'd demand my money back... |
| Thu 13 Mar | Tim Lara | It's not really a portal - it's a search engine - but I though since people mentioned Google's news, I would mention http://www.daypop.com . It indexes weblogs as well as news sites, and it works extremely well for me...Their 'Top 40' list is usually pretty interesting, too. |
| Fri 14 Mar | pb | Do you have any examples of bad links? I'm not sure how you expect to be automatically logged in without having some portion of your credentials saved. |
| Fri 14 Mar | S | Here is an example, In the section 'Top Stories: Canadian Press Association' if I click on the story 'Canadians could be deployed with U.S., British forces in Iraq War', it is supposed to go to this link http://ca.news.yahoo.com/030314/6/s7jb.html but it always brings you to this link instead http://news.yahoo.com/ which has nothing to do with the story I am interested about. RocketJeff Yeah I want my money back!!! :-) Nah what I meant to write there was not complain but let them know of the bug. I finally did yesterday but haven't heard back. |
| Sat 15 Mar | Mike Sivertsen | A do-it-yourself portal I've been using for several months may be an alternative: http://www.mypip.com/. You set the links yourself and can rearrange content as needed. Also possible to share your portal page with others. |
| How do I make a forum like this one? | Thu 13 Mar | Antonio J. Galvan |
| Im favorably impressed with the architecture of the present discussion forum. I believe such scheme would suit a quite small forum Id like to get started, I wondered which of the free web based forum implementation services would allow me to most closely emulate the Joel on Software forums. Should such prospect be impossible, which tools would help me get the job done? Many thanks, Antonio |
| Thu 13 Mar | Patrik | Over in this thread http://discuss.fogcreek.com/joelonsoftware/default.asp?cmd=show&ixPost=32302&ixReplies=9 there is a discussion of free forum software. |
| Thu 13 Mar | Frederic Faure | Just one PHP script and some space on a MySQL server: www.johnsadventures.com/backend/DiscussionForum/APHPDiscussionForum.html |
| Thu 13 Mar | Li-fan Chen | Create a table of users (email, full name, survey, date added, status, source ip, cookie) Create a table of forum listing ( questionid, forum question, forum owner first name, forum owner last name, date added) Create a table of storing the non-branchable threads (questionid, answer, full name, email addr, Use the users table to automatically flag jerks for easier moderation. Use the forum listing to list the questions at the beginning and to store the questions when users pick a question to see the stream of thoughts just do: select full name, email, answer from table answers order by date added where questionid = question id of the quesetion picked To ensure people don't see your email just use an emailid and reference a emailid -> emailaddr table It won't be as pretty as this forum right away.. but that's probably how you would do it at first try. |
| Thu 13 Mar | Li-fan Chen | Additional features provided by this discussion forum is the ability to disable messages or even entire question/answer associations to keep the chats on topic. So you just need an inactive/active status flag I don't know if this feature exist or is even useful, but I suspect that there's a karma count for this forum engine. Internally for reporting purpose you might have a karma count which is calculated from who gives really good answers so in a administration enabled page moderators can mark a thread as good question.. and any given answer as good answer.. and your karma point increases internally.. that way a new moderator would know who is okay to ban or not. Other features that make this forum non-trivial is an ability to automatically flag troublesome posts.. there need to be a way to determine whether people are just trolling and causing trouble (otherwise the moderator would have to read every post) I guess you could write a little bayasian filter to highlight trolls automatically... You need to clean up the input to prevent answers from popping up ads for readers..and other stupid stuff like that.. without making it too difficult for user to submit legimate data like programming code and URLs.. So if you want to successfully replicate this forum, YMMV |
| Thu 13 Mar | Li-fan Chen | There has to be some anti-idiot proofing too, you have to ensure that you don't accidently allow reclicks (click back, click submit again) to cause duplicate messages to be submitted in response tot he same question. Okay, I made my point.. it's both easy and hard to get it working exactly like fog creek's. But the hardest part is having enough people show up. The net's filled with trillions of very very very quiet forums... even those forums backed by thousand dollar award winning software.. |
| Thu 13 Mar | SC | 'Create a table of users (email, full name, survey, date added, status, source ip, cookie)' What is the field 'survey' used for? Also, Discuss@JoS doesn't seem to associate any status with users. User details are transient and coupled tightly to the post so there is little need for a user table. Hence, wouldn't it be better just to have two tables - topics and messages? |
| Thu 13 Mar | Joel Spolsky | you only need one table, for 'posts'. Some posts have parents (those are replies). Posts without parents are top level posts. |
| Thu 13 Mar | Chris Tavares | Not being a database guy, I've always wondered something - do you store the actual text of the post in the database as well? If you do, how do you define the field so that you aren't arbitrarily limited on the length of posts? Or do you just set some limit with VARCHAR(1024) or whatever? |
| Thu 13 Mar | Joel Spolsky | most databases have a variable-length, long text data type. In Access it's called MEMO, in SQL Server it's called TEXT. The record only stores a pointer to a separately managed area of disk. |
| Thu 13 Mar | Li-fan Chen | It's really gross but some people join up the varchars with limits. So a really long 8000 char message would store as 8 rows in a varchar(1000) field. And you use a helper function that grabs them all and join up the function. It's another way. Joel thanks a question table is unnecessary for this simple example :) |
| Thu 13 Mar | Li-fan Chen | EmailIds -> Emailaddrs are also unnecessary if the session remembers the userid.. this is only useful for multiple emails and the like.. |
| Thu 13 Mar | | ...but it's the, erm, interesting mix of posters who really make a board. Amazon should sell them prepackaged. 'Grow your own forum pack - includes in variable quanities: Jaded Programmers, Rush Limbaugh Listeners, Out Of Their Depth Schoolkids, Semantic Argument Bores, European Lurkers...' |
| Thu 13 Mar | anti-troll | ...and unnamed trolls with axes to grind. |
| Sat 15 Mar | | damn, you got me! |
| Cross-platform options? | Thu 13 Mar | LC |
| I thought id post this here, since we seem to have intelligent people reading :) First the groan: Weve just spent a good 6 months on the lastest upgrade to our web based application, using Microsoft IIS and ASP to deliver an application in Microsoft Visual Foxpro. Now marketing tells us that is great, but could we convert it to run on Apache as well - by which I suspect they mean Apache on Linux... Now the question: I really dont want to have to have 2 totally different applications. Id like a common application (at least at source level) to maintain all the business rules etc. What are the real options for building cross-platform web based applications? What languages exist that I can build a rock-solid application in and then compile it to run on Win2000 and Unix (Linux) boxes and serve them up on IIS or Apache or whatever? Has anyone actually tried doing this? All (sensible) opinions welcomed. |
| Thu 13 Mar | Canuck | Java |
| Thu 13 Mar | Walter Rumsby | Is ChilliSoft ASP still around? I think Sun bought them, but essentially it is supposed to allow ASP pages to run on *nix servers (possibly as an Apache plug-in). I'm only aware of the product, so I can't comment on how well it performs. |
| Thu 13 Mar | Matthew Lock | It's Chillisoft is still around but it's called 'Sun ONE Active Server Pages' now http://wwws.sun.com/software/chilisoft/ |
| Thu 13 Mar | Matthew Lock | We build all our web applications in Perl, and they will run unmodified on Apache (linux and windows) and IIS. |
| Thu 13 Mar | Walter Rumsby | Actually, in answer to your actual question... Java is the answer... although I'm surprised that this even needs to be said. |
| Thu 13 Mar | runtime | Macromedia Cold Fusion runs on Windows, Linux, Solaris, and HPUX and works with many databases. Cold Fusion is built on J2EE, so you can use your existing J2EE or the bundled JRUN server. You can also integrate Cold Fusion with whatever web server you use, such as IIS, Apache, Netscape, or Sun ONE. If you don't already have a web server, there is a bundled web server built on JRUN. http://www.macromedia.com/software/coldfusion/productinfo/system_reqs/ |
| Thu 13 Mar | Vincent Marquez | perl works, but I dont' think i'm the only one who feels uncomfortable running perl on IIS. We're currently developing a web application that will run on a linux farm, but we develop right off our own laptops. We're using jboss, which is a free j2ee server. I've been pretty impressed so far. Took a while to set it up, but now that its up, everything seems to be running smoothly. |
| Thu 13 Mar | Frank | I'm surprised you didn't anticipate this. Apart from Java there is also the trusty stalwart, C++ which I have used for my cross platform web applications since 95. Now however I am looking forward to when http://www.go-mono.net/c-sharp.html finish their C# compiler for Linux, then we can use C# for cross platform web apps as well.... |
| Thu 13 Mar | Matthew Lock | > perl works, but I dont' think i'm the only one who feels > uncomfortable running perl on IIS. Who feels uncomfortable about it? Activestate's Windows port of Perl is a great fit with Windows and IIS. It has plug ins for ISAPI, ASP etc. I ahve used it for years in production and it's totally stable. http://www.activeperl.com/Products/ActivePerl/ |
| Thu 13 Mar | Matthew Lock | ...don't just take my word for it http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&selm=392342eb_2%40excalibur.gbmtech.net |
| Thu 13 Mar | Joe Random Webprogrammer | The replies thus far have missed out a popular and perhaps obvious candidate, PHP Yahoo uses it (but you shouldnt necessarily use it because they do), its simple to learn and get up to speed on.. and regardless of what the Perl enthusiasts say, I somehow feel more comfortable installing PHP on an IIS server than ActivePerl.. besides, the addons cost money for Perl, but the accelerator for PHP is available for free It runs wonderfully on Apache of course, just check Netcraft for the most popular apache module.. its not mod_perl, its mod_php Of course, if its a very large project, you may have problems maintaining the codebase (I program in both Perl and PHP, so I think I know what I'm talking about) and you may also be slightly turned off by having to mix HTML with PHP.. sometimes that can be hard to read (but of course, you're used to ASP, so its much the same thing) |
| Thu 13 Mar | Walter Rumsby | I'm still thinking I've missed something in the original post - and yes all of the options mentioned above are worthwhile options (there are many cross-platform options as long as your provider is not called 'Microsoft') - it just seems so surprising that someone needs to ask 'what are my cross-platform options' for a web app in 2003. |
| Thu 13 Mar | Li-fan Chen | You can get Apache to work on both platforms, but only on windows can you plug in ASP.dll.. To get asp.net going you can use the in-development mono on the linux side or what Microsoft provides you on the Windows side. On Apache.. there's mod_gnomebasic or something like that.. as a language engine it is discontinued and no longer particularly pushed by the Ximian development team.. but as a ASP substitution it can almost there but not quite ASP 2.0. Chilisoft or Sun ONE is a little pricy but basically you get all you ever want out of ASP except an environment where you can access COM objects.. I am not sure you can run every com object you want on Linux.. as they are not exactly platform agnostic. The Sun ONE/Chilisoft answer has been either DCOM or rewrite all your com objects and Java-based components. All of the free and commercial ASP solutions on Linux can use the ODBC-substitutions provided by the driver geeks who do it for fun..so you can still connect to a separate SQL Server on Windows NT/2K from Linux.. but your biggest problem is learning how to use a subset of ASP (safe subset) and trying to make do without COM. |
| Thu 13 Mar | Li-fan Chen | Sun One probably provides a proxy that let's you run out-of-process COM objects on a separate Windows BOX (or VMWare..that's always an option for running Windows in Linux).. and tunnel the responses and requests back to the Unix side of things. There is also an effort to clone ASP .. you write the ASP script.. the tool would compile it to java bytecodes.. and you have access to all the java business logic you can come up with.. and most of the asp code you write acts the same way. I think this is either free or commercial. Don't know the name off the top of my head. All of these solutions are pretty poorly supported (which to me means the number of articles written on using them according to Google) compared to good ol asp 3.0 and the new asp.net. But that doesn't mean you aren't competent enough to reap the benefits of going 'free' or 'near free'. ASP is at the end a very simple wrapper.. you should be able to make the transition as long as you know how to tell whether your projects are using very complex ASP /IIS facilities or not. Another thing to point out.. if you have any IIS filters or processes.. like URL rewriters and all that.. you'll have to find Apache equivalents (mod_perl can do URL rewriting really well--it's actually really famous for its rewriting feature..) |
| Thu 13 Mar | David Roper | If you're up to rewriting everything I would urge you to look at Python, either using Apache's mod_python or, if you're looking for an application server, Quixote or Zope. Zope is also a good choice if you need to access databases as it has a number of good interfaces (via ZODB) and load balancing (via ZEO). |
| Thu 13 Mar | Colin Evans | Jave is currently the best choice for reliable and portable web applications. Check out Tomcat or JBoss/Resin for web serving; they are the open-source standards, and both integrate closely with Apache. If you're using FoxPro right now for a DB, MySQL is free and easy to learn and will provide similiar scalability and better stability. Considering that you have an IIS/ASP frontend with a FoxPro database, though, dropping everything and rebuilding in Java is a big risk. You should probably try to figure out why you need cross-platform support, and make clear the costs. |
| Thu 13 Mar | LC | Thanks guys for your rapid responses. When you are a Microsoft house you tend to lose track of where other solutions are going. I had assumed Java was going to be the most popular solution, but I was looking for some other ideas just to make sure. I was also a little nervious about running Java on an *MS* machine - not sure about stability etc. (I have, like many people, had bad experiences with Java on the desktop). Perl, PHP and C++ were the other options in my mind. I should have mentioned that the VFP components are actually middle tier (business and data access) connecting via COM to the ASP pages and ODBC to an Oracle database. Thus rules out Chillisoft because it can't do COM on *nix boxes. As for why we didn't anticipate this, as I said we are an MS house and this is the first real project where we have moved from the desktop to the web. Desktop software sales are usually arranged by Business units where Windows is fine. When you get to the web you hit IT departments where Windows is the devil. We hadn't anticipated just how strong this hate of Microsoft is - officially 60 % of our clients do not use Internet Explorer (although in practice everyone does) Again thanks for the advice (and confirming my suspicions) Cheers |
| Fri 14 Mar | Just me (Sir to you) | 'officially 60 % of our clients do not use Internet Explorer (although in practice everyone does)' ROFL! |
| Fri 14 Mar | drazen | Maybe you would like to look at Delphi+Kylix. Can do Windows and Linux with same code. And is much closer to VisualWhatever then java. |
| Fri 14 Mar | drazen | And it does SOAP and Webservices on Linux and Win2000 for IIS and Apache. |
| Fri 14 Mar | Li-fan Chen | Drazen that sounds like a good deal. I don't use Kylix nor Delphi.. how much would an enterprise license cost if you bought a package that can build to both platforms? And is it that much more VisualWhatever than JBuilder? |
| Sat 15 Mar | drazen | Take a look at Borland homepage, they have pricing info, you can get eval copies for everything. I think that if you buy Delphi enterprise, you get Kylix enterprise in box. Not sure. Delphi/Kylix IDE is much more like MS IDEs. Standard windows app. disclaimer: I do not work for Borland, I do not make money selling Borland stuff. |
| Supply Chain Management Software | Fri 14 Mar | Prakash S |
| This is for a friend. He is trying to identify which SCM s/w to buy. It is for medium to large scale shipping company that has offices in various parts of the world. Have any of you guys used any such software? What would you recomend? I2, Oracle, etc are the first ones that I could think of, but want your thoughts and opinion on this. Thanks for your inputs. |
| Fri 14 Mar | John Burton | The company I work for makes supply chain managment software. I've no idea if it would be what you are looking for but here is the URL just in case : http://www.finechain.com/ |
| Fri 14 Mar | Alex | http://www.sap.com/solutions/scm/ |
| Fri 14 Mar | Mike | http://www.agilisys.com/agilisys_supply_chain_planningS.htm |
| Fri 14 Mar | Paul | http://www.webplan.com/ |
| Fri 14 Mar | Prakash S | thanks guys! will ask him to look into this. |
| Social aspects of "world class" developers? | Thu 13 Mar | Bored Bystander |
| The world class thread intrigued me because someone posted in a bulleted list of attributes there that the best helped others on web based coding discussion boards. Most developers I personally know have no interest in participating in professional tech related newsgroups, or in fact, have no interest in even socializing with other software people. But Im in a backwater with little technology culture so maybe my sample is skewed down in quality. Myself - perhaps I am or am not world class. Id be satisfied with continent class. :-) Ive posted help to others on occasion in response to questions on newsgroups and other places, and I do see the same names appearing all the time on those places as gurus. But even though my schedule is flexible, Ive found that its just no *fun* re-reading repetitive beginner questions, and very often you arent even thanked for or get any acknowledgement for a tip that works. Basically, I see participation in web discussion as an extremely low leverage way to network. It doesnt seem to have any conceivable payback unless you were to literally live in front of a computer for 12 hours a day, 7 days a week. More power to those who can motivate themselves to a high level of effort in this direction but it aint me. So, what does anyone here think - are the best more socially oriented than their less illustrious peers, or is it a wash? And perhaps the greater social tendencies of some leads to a greater sense that the person *is* better - better personal PR, in other words. Just curious what others thought of this. |
| Thu 13 Mar | Mike Swieton | My specific experiances answering questions people ask is when I'm looking for help, too. Whenever I'm learning something, I tend to ask questions on forums. While I'm reading them, I tend to answer questions I already know the answer to. Once I learn enough that I have no more questions, I tend to visit the forum less and less and answer questions less and less. |
| Thu 13 Mar | Robin Debreuil | I agree I post/read most when I'm learning something. I don't know about people who spend 12 hours a day reading/posting to a computer being more socially oriented though! |
| Thu 13 Mar | HeyCoolAid! | As Joel said, great programmers 'Are smart, and get things done'. I can't imagine that spending 12 hours a day reading/posting to a message board is either smart or indicative of getting things done... unless your company is paying you for that... which I highly doubt. |
| Thu 13 Mar | John Ridout | So that means if I post this I'm not a 'world class' developer, damn! |
| Thu 13 Mar | flamebait sr. | No, but smart and gets things done does include contributing to CS theory (i.e. certain usenet groups and other scholarly discussion forums, but prolly not here ;) ) and being a resource to the fellow engineers. In school, I loved helping people out because then I'd be sure that I understood something, if I could explain it to somebody else. |
| Thu 13 Mar | Bored Bystander | Well, the question quickly devolved into discussion of online participation. My bad, I should have phrased things differently. ;-) On the entirely self-serving aspect of board participation, I've occasionally heard urban folklore about developers getting contracts or landing jobs because they were discovered on a newsgroup or discussion board. Flamebait made an excellent point about contributing to CS theory via board discussion and I think that's a social positive that any professional would want to consider. 'Professional collaborate with peers' ought to be a principle of practice in any profession. On the other hand - my opinion only- discussion boards can enourage beginner laziness because the temptation exists to post a question rather than try to search the message base for similar cases in answered questions. I think that's where I get my reluctance to spend a lot of time on boards - the content in a given topic gets very repetitive. The more complex 'second order' or conceptual questions that would be fun to discuss don't tend to get asked that often. On collaboration - I've found that the people that I *don't* want to be associated with in this industry have a 'cliqeuy' attitude and go out of their way to *not* help anyone, either in person or online. |
| Thu 13 Mar | one programmer's opinion | 'The 'world class' thread intrigued me because someone posted in a bulleted list of attributes there that 'the best' helped others on web based coding discussion boards. ' Hi Bored Bystander, Sounds like you are referring to the post I made in the 'world class' thread. I doubt that most developers who spend a lot of time posting helpful messages on discussion boards do it simply to network, although, I too have heard a few stories where someone was offered a job because of thier online activities. Some people DO get paid to answer questions in discussion forums, however, I believe most probably do it for the following reasons: * He/she has no social life or enjoys the type of social life that an online community offers them. * He/she is marketing something (ever visit the Extreme Programming newsgroup on Usenet?). * He/she is a book author or article writer looking for the next hot topic to write about. * The board might serve as a meeting place. Developer might have formed several offline relationships at a recent industry conference. I haven't visited DevX's newsgroup for quite some time, but when I did do so, I always noticed that the same VB MVPs were always there ready to answer a question or point someone in the right direction. * They enjoy helping others learn to do something they have already mastered. Sometimes a developer is looking for an ego boost and sometimes a developer does it for more altruistic reasons (loves to solve problems using a particular programming language). |
| Thu 13 Mar | | Carmack's own wife described him as 'Spock like'. Most questions on this board are gossip and not technically interesting. If you want to interact with world class developers go to where world class developers hang out. |
| Thu 13 Mar | Patrik | > If you want to interact with world class developers go to >where world class developers hang out. The proxy at work denies ./, so I guess Im stuck here. |
| Thu 13 Mar | Patrik | Bored, I think its as easy as some people get along and some dont get along. Sometime you come across a working partner that elevates your own skills, so that 1+1 is not 2, but more like 4.So that 2 'continent class' developers can elevate themselves to 'world class' by working together. If you find it worthwhile to socialize with somebody you will be able to, if not your body language will say 'no way', and you probably can not fake it :) |
| Thu 13 Mar | Bored Bystander | >> Most questions on this board are gossip and not technically interesting. If you want to interact with world class developers go to where world class developers hang out. So where *do* world class developers hang out online? I've gathered that there are forums for particular niches like game development where gurus hold forth. What about other segments of the IT world? Actually, I have gotten the impression that some 'world class' or at least 'major political jurisdiction class' developers do hang out here. Yes, the discussions here usually aren't specific nuts and bolts; but they help me (and I presume others) to understand how software is done in other environments and they illuminate worklife aspects that don't get discussed much in a language or tech specific fora. I'd call this about the most 'serious' board on the web dedicated to SW developers. >>> If you want to interact with world class developers go to >>>where world class developers hang out. >> The proxy at work denies ./, so I guess Im stuck here. LOL! You can't be serious. /. is the equivalent of a few diamonds and flecks of platinum floating around in a swimming pool (or perhaps worse). IE, there are some really insightful commentaries over there but the drift of the discussion topics is usually toward games, free software, and politics interfering with free speech/MP3s/free whatever. |
| Fri 14 Mar | Patrik | Bored, No I wasnt serious, lame attempt at humor :) |
| Fri 14 Mar | Just me (Sir to you) | 'discussion boards can enourage beginner laziness' wadayamean 'Beginner', where all lazy pros here dude. |
| Fri 14 Mar | Simon Lucy | Yes I've got work occasionally because of contributions online. That isn't why I contribute particularly but when it happens its pleasant. |
| Fri 14 Mar | - Roland | 'A guru has the expertise of a specialist and recognizes that programming is only 15 percent communicating with the computer, that it's 85 percent communicating with people.' Heck, if I only could remember where this quote is from ... |
| Fri 14 Mar | trollbooth | HeyCoolAid!, some of us are actually working while posting; multitasking. As I write the sentence I am solving world hunger. |
| Fri 14 Mar | trollbooth | Sometimes a guru will come out of the woodwork and reveal that he has been lingering, was is the case with Bruce Perens and his posts on /. I would consider him world class and yet he still posts to 'useless' messageboards and finds time to interact with others in the community. |
| Fri 14 Mar | HeyCoolAid! | I didn't mean that one should *never* post to message boards, and I agree that social interaction is a great way to keep up on all the new stuff going on (that we should all keep up with). I just meant that it's probably hard to be a guru if most of your working hours are spent posting messages. Moderation is usually a good thing. ;) |
| Fri 14 Mar | Srdjan | 'On the entirely self-serving aspect of board participation, I've occasionally heard urban folklore about developers getting contracts or landing jobs because they were discovered on a newsgroup or discussion board.' It is not just urban folklore... My friend got involved on some newsgroup five years ago (while living in Serbia). Somebody from South African software company saw his posts, contacted him directly and, after phone interview and small test project he packed up things and moved there... |
| Real World Metaphore | Thu 13 Mar | Benji Smith |
| In a continued effort to explain what I do to my dear spouse, Im looking for a good metaphor to explain the concept of finite state machines.
Im currently writing a FSM implementation of an XML parsing engine (for a relatively new programming language that doesnt yet have a native XML parser. Also, projects like xerces are way too big for my needs). I think its an interesting project, and Ive been telling my wife little bits and pieces of why Im doing it, but when she asks what is a finite state machine Im at a loss for an easy way to explain it.
Its easy to explain a stack because you can refer to the salad-bar-plate-stackers. And its easy to explain a queue becuase its exactly like the way we line up for tickets at the movies. And its even possible to explain the structure of an XML document, because I can show an example document with for a bookstore with |