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Sunday, January 12, 2003 |
The future is not objects
Tozan said to his monks, "You monks should know there is an even higher understanding in Buddhism."
A monk stepped forward and asked, "What is the higher Buddhism?"
Tozan answered, "It is not Buddha."[traditional Zen koan]
Managage code is language-neutral, right? No! Right now the CLI is very much tilted in favor of Object-Oriented languages (C++, C#, VB, Java). This is fine for now, but looking around the computing landscape leads me to a hypothesis:
Hypothesis: The interesting programming models in the next three years are not going to be Object-Oriented in nature.
I'm hardly the first person to say this. Objects are pretty mature, and there's a lot of interest right now in other ways of doing things. XML andWebServices for example are both non-OO at heart (heck, guys like Tim Ewald and Don Box have even been talking about the joys of weak typing). This hypothesis is sort of academically interesting, but there is a corrollary:
Corrollary: The long-term success of the CLR may hinge on its ability to accomondate non-OO models of programming
and this is an interesting idea to me. So, Discuss. Am I all wet?
11:55:26 AM 
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Software and the City
Andy linked to a funny post by a woman defending her life as a programmer, Carrie Bradshaw style:
I have so many girl friends who complain there are no guys out there, or guys are hard to meet. Hey, make the trip to the world of programming. The best and the brightest and the most original of all the guys are in the world of programming
I like this blog - her post on Prevayler completely cracked me up, and she has lots to say about AOP. It's sad that so many women today avoid the software fields and I'm happy to see a woman bash some of the myths.
Personal obervation: at the DevelopMentor Guerrilla events I teach at we typically have around eighty attendees, and women make up less than ten percent of the usual crowd. This varies based on the technology involved. Generally speaking the closer a class is to the hardware the fewer women attend. The ten percent that I see is dominated by European (especially Russian), Asian, and Indian women. - American women are few and black American women even fewer. This is so clearly due to social pressures - America does not encourage its young women to be "brainy" and especially not to go into software (largely because of stereotypes outlined in chiara's post). It's a shame, and I don't think there are any easy answers.
(Update: Slashdot backs this us with some more figures, and apparently chiara isn't alone in blogging about it)
11:11:36 AM
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A Cryptography primer
I've been nagging my friend and colleague Craig Andera that he should start a blog, and he finally did, with a different and interesting post on crypto.
10:41:02 AM
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© Copyright 2003 Jason Whittington.
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