Dreamsongs Wiki

IsAnyoneDoingAnythingInteresting

OOPSLA for me was a place of new ideas, things that thrilled me and kept me interested in being in this profession. Some of those things I took home and did things about. Some of them just energized me.

So here I'm suggesting that we think about interesting things that are going on, and that, having thought of them, we declare them to be part of what OOPSLA is, and get speakers and threads going at OOPSLA that focus on those things.

What's interesting to you? Below the line is my starting list. --RonJeffries

Pen !PCs and how to program them.

OO Scripting languages like Ruby

.NET (No, really. Get over the evil empire thing. Write anything, run anywhere is more powerful than write Java, run anywhere. I grant freely that Windows isn't (quite) "anywhere" but imagine what an open source .NET might do.)

What interesting things do you think of that should become part of a new OOPSLA? --RonJeffries

And here's something that could be interesting if anyone was doing it: Java and C#, and for that matter even Smalltalk, are now buried under giant class libraries. The class library is simply not learnable, and not manageable. The individual classes are almost uniformly huge and over-generalized for any purpose.

Two things could be interesting relating to this.

  1. Back to basics. Show how we can do with direct OO implementation skill, in a few lines, what takes a billion lines of use of some existing library object, after a billion years of trying to find it and learn how to use it. Bits, bytes, streams, the good stuff still works for more apps than we use it for. [[We can learn a lot about this by looking at the scripting languages in general, where very simple technology along with the more interesting non-class-library infrastructure (and frameworks) supply just the right stuff. For example, this Wiki, which is written in an OO-ish Perl (1
  4. lines?), using stylesheets, and killer browser display technology is a lot more interesting than a lot of the more complex things. -rpg ]] [[Gush]]]
  5. Organizing and searching the class library. If we must have the damn things, what's going on in really new and creative ways to make them accessible, intellectually available.

If there's exciting work going on in that area, I'd like to know about it. --RonJeffries

There are a lot of things being tried out in the Smalltalk community. Stephane Ducasse et al, the Whisper browser in Squeak, the SmalltalkDoc project at Cincom. It is too early to be sure about any of these. There needs to be a workshop on the subject to get all these people together. The OOPSLA technical sessions have not addressed this issue recently, and I think that the European academic Smalltalkers have submitted papers. But the program committee seems to be more interested in languages. -RalphJohnson

[[I have to admit that Smalltalk work now just saddens me. It's a world that might have been. I'd love it if we could find a way to make Smalltalk, or its core ideas, relevant again to the mainstream. -RonJeffries]]

Things that I think are interesting are ubibuitous computing, community wireless networks, and computational biology. -RalphJohnson

[speaking of which, I'm co-organizing a workshop * OOPSLA (ah!) about the challenges of building software for ubiquitous computing.

http:/www.ics.uci.edu~lopes/bspc04.html

-CristaLopes

New IDEs are getting pretty darn good. Eclipse, IntelliJ, even VisualStudio. What kinds of add-ins or changes could give them the power and glory of Smalltalk and Lisp browsers?

Test-Driven Development, it seems to me, might be more deep, intellectually, than many recognize. Similarly micro-refactoring. What should OOPSLA be saying about those things?

-rj

GUSH the above -- this is what I get for being in late :)

objects are nearly pervasive -- that is good -- but a back to the basics approach sounds right. Trygve Reenskaug mentioned this year that much of the potential of Simula has not yet made its way into current OO language capabilities.

topic ideas -- real world implementations -- how are they really working out? things like the house of the future (smart house), all the engineering in my new car that is really software, etc.

a debate on the contributions of UML -- are we becoming too catholic? where are todays innovations? where is the cool factor?

--Cecilia Haskins

Charles Simonyi's Intentional Programming http:/c2.comcgi/wiki?IntentionalProgramming

-Dragos Manolescu

And, in a similar vein, http://www.ergnosis.com looks promising.

--KevlinHenney

In contrast, sort of, there's refactoring. I don't know if anyone is doing anything interesting here or not, but I am fascinated by "local action", small atomic refactorings without much large-scale intent. It feels, when doing it, as if a good overall design just "emerges". Part of what one does here, of course, is to find and try to express intention in perhaps a smaller sense than that of Simonyi. -- RonJeffries

Doing some serious work in Project dynamics (and product development lifecycle) and working on a simulation model (generic) that visualizes 'worse before better' dynamics that often work against successful introduction of good practices like reuse, frameworks... May have something ready to organize a group modeling event. Martine Devos