Monday, July 14, 2003

Jef Raskin: The Woes of IDEs. More modern languages, instead of becoming more maintainable, have gotten less so. This would have surprised Weinberg (see his epigram at the beginning of this piece) and should upset anybody working on or managing a project involving programming today. A prime example of this is Visual Basic (VB). A VB program soon becomes a morass of windows and requires a slog of opening and closing windows to create a program or to follow what is happening in a program. The language is largely unstructured, and writing a program is a wrist-numbing experience. Not only is the environment hellish, but also the language is frustrating to use unless your interface restricts itself to the standard Microsoft widgets. Creativity and imagination are rapidly punished; anything outside the interface norm is either inordinately difficult or impossible to do. The problems with the interface to VB and its reluctance to implement new interface widgets are especially surprising, considering that the person credited with designing VB writes books on interface design. If, like me, you ponder about the subtle relationship between programming languages and their IDEs, you should take a look at this essay. But beware: Quite a few of your favorite languages are mercilessly criticized by Jef... [Lambda the Ultimate] 5:06:53 PM     OSCON: Open source in the enterprise. Stormy Peters' keynote speech at OSCON 2003 covered some interesting points about how HP works to maintain a sane open source policy and works with the open source community. [Meerkat: An Open Wire Service: O'Reilly Network Weblogs] Interesting to see HP's guidelines for employees contributing to OSS and using OSS. [Tom Pierce's Blog] I wish that I could have gone to OSCON!  As Tom noted in an earlier post, there was a great Ruby presence.  Ruby presentations from the conference will be available here. 5:04:00 PM     Some interesting OS X management tips from Mike Bombich. 5:00:14 PM

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