I went to the rOOts 2003 conference this year. As always, it was a great convention. ROOTS draws a fairly small, yet advanced audience. A recurring theme this year seems to be agile development. It also seems like all the speakers concluded with the fact that “everything was better in the good old days” (more or less). This seems to be a sign of the times, and was also reflected in Alan Kay’s keynote at the O’Reilly Emercing Technology conference.

How Mortal These Fools Be… …Wherein we explore what it means to be a computer, or computation, or computrons, or a computer programmer, and why Ken is even touching a computer when he’s on vacation. (From Ken Arnold’s Weblog) [via Artima Weblogs]

I am so sick of reading about the poor economics behind arguments when it comes to tax cut. Being a Norwegian citizen, I am used to taxation levels that would make an American faint. And I don’t know if it really hurts us at all. What I miss in the discussion goes back to the basics of economy: I am not an economist, but this is how I understand it:

A is for Apple You may have already known that A is for Apple. But did you know that O is for O’Reilly? Check out what Google reports for single character queries. (From Ward Cunningham’s Weblog) [via Artima Weblogs]

This book talks about the role of a tester in an XP project. So it is about acceptance testing, not unit testing (see Test-Driven Development by Kent Beck for that). The long and short of it is that I would really like to run an XP project with people who have read, understand, and become excited about this book. My experience is that a project suffers from not having someone who’s job is 100% quality.

The best thing to happen since the inceptions of C#: “anonymous methods” are .NET delegates cum closures. Finally we can write syntax like: addButton.Click += new EventHandler(object sender, EventArgs e) { list.Add(new ListItem()); } Even better: Anonymous methods will be closures, so you can use variables from the scope. This is a much needed amendment. Why was it not there from the start? (whine, whine)

Very noteworthy quote: “I think that in the long term the larger code generation efforts, the “application generators,” will become a thing of the past. They are there because the underlying technologies and architectures don’t yet support programming at a high level. " (Pragmatic Dave Thomas) Truer words were seldom said.

Attributes. Keeps getting better ’n better. Check out Extensible C#, Clemens Vasters new demos, and the underutilized ContextBoundObject ADO.NET. The ADO.NET model for modeling and transporting data hits right on the spot. Better FFI. P/Invoke wins against JNI, hands down (too bad it is probably overused, though) Not EJBs! Getting rid of the defunct EJB model saves a lot of headaches. Better UI. For the user, that is, not the developer!

Open Source Community. The number of excellent open-source tools for Java is staggering. Look at HSqlDb, BeanShell, Eclipse, Recoder, JGraph, Tomcat, JBoss, and many more. More importantly, the Java community has proven much more interested in doing it the open-source way. Eclipse. Already mentioned, but it deserves a point of its own. Eclipse is a better IDE than VS.NET! Checked Exceptions. Less Native Code & more code reliability. .NET still has some weird crashes.

The Psychology of Computer Programming (Jerry Weinberg) The Pragmatic Programmer (Andrew Hunt and Dave Thomas) - from Journeyman to Master (the view of the software professional as a craftman is the only thing that will save the business!) PeopleWare (Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister) Extreme Programming Explained (Kent Beck) After the Gold Rush (Steve McConnell)