Monday, February 21, 2005

What is next after OOP? It's an interesting question that comes up from time to time. I don't really know of course. I feel strongly that the next evolution has to move humans out of the programming loop. Anything else is just really the same thing different day. OOP, functional, logic, AOP, relational, etc is all really the same stuff. It is the human that is the programmer, it doesn't really matter what we use as materials. An artist creates art using paint, marble, fabric, glass, twigs. Programmers create programs. The results are different using different materials, but it is still fundamentally the same creation. From a process perspective some combination of SCRUM/XP is probably as productive as human programmers can be. That will be our funadmental limit of production as programmers. We can use model driven architecture to systemetize the production of code we already know how to build. That gives us another multiple of productivity. Human political/social infrastructure is the true limit of productivity. We will always be limitted by our institutions, which tends to be the most regressive part of any system. Then we are limitted by basic skills. Not everyone can be a good programmer. We could scale the system by making more programmers, but that doesn't really work as you have be good to do good work. And doing good work requires keeping small highly interactive teams. The small incremental wins we make make in software development with improved languages, processes, tools, IDEs, skills, etc are good, but they fundamentally limit how much software can be produced to a small unimpressive are under the curve. Nothing original in all of this meandering, but it is the reason I don't get very excited on debates about what's next afterr OOP, or if functional is better than OO, or if dynamic is better than static. It's all close enough to the same thing that it doesn't matter much. comment[] 8:42:14 AM

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