Better Programming Metaphors?
If you follow the rumor mill, you may have heard of X# or “Xen”, the crazy next-generation programming language that was reportedly being cooked up by people on my former team. I won’t say what they all are working on now, but some more of them have started blogs.
Victoria Livschitz of Sun discusses some ideas she is having more generallyabout improving software construction. She tends to be relatively non-partisan, and as usual, she raises some good points that need to be raised. Software is really not living up to its potential, and I’m doubtful about any imminent breakthroughs. This means that there is plenty of opportunty left for smart people in the software industry. With the return of Gosling, and Victoria doing interviews like this, it appears that Sun is still taking software seriously.
Anyway, I’m fairly utilitarian in my approach to programming languages and OO, but I was struck by the comment “An enormous mess of XML documents that are now being created by enterprises at an alarming rate will be haunting our industry for decades”. XML is for data what Java is for programming; very exciting, and definitely an improvement, but no panacea; and no breakthroughs on the immediate horizon. Both coding and data management have a long way to go.