http://elegantcode.com/2008/04/15/am-i-asking-for-too-much/

Sorry, I guess I am not explaining myself well. I respect your opinion although I try not to tell you that because I think it gives you a swelled head :-).

I was not trying to give my history; I was trying to give a bit of computer history and trying to put some perspective on why I think there has been no real innovation in computers in the last 40 years. The primary things I see as the backbones of what we use computers for are:

1) Databases - CODASYK defined the standard for network databases in 1969 (RDMBS were first described by Codd in the 1960’s and 70’s at IBM)
2) Word Processing - The Unix Concepts of text formatting for publishing came around in the 1970’s (as a matter of fact UNIX was first designed as a text editing and text formatting system)
3) Spreadsheets - First patented in 1971, VisiCalc was actually being distributed for the Apple II in 1979
4) General Programming via high level Languages -
a) Interpreted Languages (If you want the full deal Smalltalk was around in the 1970’s. Object oriented, dynamically typed and reflective)
b) Compiled Languages (Cobol was created in 1959 and C in 1972)
5) WIMP Interfaces - (Pioneered by the Xerox Alto in 1973)

So if you take as a baseline of 1980 we have had these systems around for at least 28 years. Most have been around longer. Sadly I have only been programming for 30 so I have played with some of these at one time or another in my career so a history of computing may sound like a personal history. Believe me it depresses me much more then you :-).

Maybe you are right I expect too much. I can’t help but see the feature set of these products though and say that on the whole the pace of innovation in computers disappoints me. Those advances we do see to have picked up come about more because of hardware advances then software advances. As Brooks says in No Silver Bullet

…the anomaly is not that software progress is so slow, but that computer hardware progress is so fast.

I think you are misinterpreting what I call accidents. Again I quote from Brooks

If we examine the three steps in software technology development that have been most fruitful in the past, we discover that each attacked a different major difficulty in building software, but that those difficulties have been accidental, not essential, difficulties.

The three that he describes include:
• High Level Languages. Now this would include java and C#.
• Time Sharing. Now this would be the entire concept or personal computers, laptops, PDA’s etc… essentially ways to get the answer immediately.
• Unified frameworks. Here he talks about UNIX, but you can also include in this the .NET framework and the Java class libraries.

See my Blog entry I first learned about Agile Development… (http://elegantcode.com/2008/03/15/everything-i-ever-wanted-to-know-about-agile-development-i-learned/)for more details on this

So my contention is that one of the reasons software innovation is so slow is we spend too much time reinventing what we have had since the 1970’s and not focusing on advancing the art of computer sceince.

Sure, if all of those different projects implement standard protocols or APIs properly.

Looking at a few HTTP daemons, Apache, nginx, Lighttpd.. they all have their own niche, even though Apache could be strongarmed into doing everything. They all use HTTP though, so they’re not too difficult to switch around if necessary, and clients don’t need to worry about it. I don’t see anyone claiming a variety of HTTP servers causes confusion.. and if it does confuse someone, they probably shouldn’t be involved in deployment anyway.

Same goes for POP3 and SMTP servers. There are quite a few alternatives in those areas, and they’re all the richer for it.

Because most of the folks in Alt.NET don’t have alot of experience with Agile/XP/OOP, they tend to focus more on the tools and less on the developers. And the intense focus on tools at the expense of the developer is what I find frustrating. They have the cart before the horse to an extent, but at least they are moving in the right direction.

I’m not sure why you gave your history, but I suspect it is a way to say, “Shut up little boy. When you’ve been around as long as I have you will know a thing or two.” But I still find your central point confusing. On one hand you say there are no new ideas, on the other you bemoan that we aren’t innovating the way you want us to innovate. But that criticism is just a little too easy to make for me to take it seriously. I mean, what stops me from saying, “Why are we still on pneumatic tires?!? Where is my hover car?” Or, “Why are we still on fossil fuels?!? Where is my ‘Mr. Fusion Home Energy Reactor’?”

But the really frustrating thing is when you dismiss the real innovation and the improvements that are made as “accidents”. I really don’t understand that, and I find it horribly insulting. You insult the what-we-have-now that doesn’t fit into your preferred world view as you pine for the what-should-be. I don’t find that pragmatic (or accurate) at all.

Wow! Wander off for a day and the discussion goes crazy on you :-).

@Josh

Actually I do mind MS having a new flavor of the week for this stuff. I should have included MSBuild in the list of things that annoy me. NANT, ANT and MSBuild. So now my build file is XML instead of a flat file with cool Macros. How does that make it better?

In some ways you are correct. MS takes the best of the Open Source tools and adds them to there stack (sometimes, other times they don’t quite get it right). It puts the mantle of respectability on the product and blesses it. But really guys thus us not so different then a lot of other companies in the last 30 years. There used to be a saying “you can’t get fired for buying IBM”. When they lost favor I think the saying transferred to Sun in the 90’s. Has it now gone to MS?

@Mike

I guess I look at this a bit differently then you. I have more history. In the mid to late 80’s I had a UNIX PC from AT&T. A early WIMP machine with it’s roots in Xerox PARC. That was 20 years ago. PARC machines were 30 years ago. We have had steady change (and the chance to buy incremental upgrades) for over 30 years. In some ways all the WIMP interfaces I listed came from a fork of the PARC design. Relational databases were described by date in the 1970’s. Heck I was using Informix SQL by 1988. Some of these tools have gotten better but I say that can be attributed to the hardware. Most of the stuff we see today either came from Bell Labs, IBM or Parc in the 1970’s.

Your comment that I am a MS bigot tickles the heck out of me. So far in my career I have got to be a Unix bigot, a Apple bigot, a DEC bigot and now I am a MS bigot. I seem to re-bigot myself every 8 years or so. As for Open Source, news flash folks we have had this since the 1970’s also. Unix was originally free in source to Universities (hence the roots of BSD UNIX). DECUS was around in the 70s and 80’s. ARPANET (the Internet) has been around since the early 70’s as Usenet. Alt.Sources and Alt.Sources.binaries has been around forever. A lot of what we think of as standard UNIX tools came from there.

I have been around through all of these and enjoyed the ride. But really the core functionality of most of what we have today was made available in the 1970’s. We have slowly evolved it since then. For 30 years we have been slowly updating and changing these systems and ignoring some of the essential issues of software development as we argue over the accidents.

If I am becoming anything anymore it is pragmatic. I hope that by getting near a common runtime and having languages utilize the same base we maybe able to stop worrying about the differences and concentrate on how to come together to solve the bigger problems. I guess I am being optimistic here though. AT&T could not do it and neither could DEC. I have to say I doubt MS will pull it off either. Sigh :-).

@Matt

I applaud the vision of the Alt.Net guys and would be even more impressed if it was new. Read the usenet and Decus charters sometime. They felt the same way.

Obviously, Microsoft could support and allow this community of alpha developers to prosper, but instead of embracing the community, they continue to enable the general community to look to them for (mis)guidance. It’s not the ALT.NETers that are enabling this or forgetting this.

Do I think that the ALT.NET group is perfect? No. Is it a step in the right direction? Absolutely. Anytime you blindly follow an ideologue (whether its technology, political or whatever) you are bound for trouble.

I would encourage some of the ALT.NETers to join in this conversation.

I think that in general, the .NET community looks to Microsoft for guidance way, way too often. Its endemic to the culture apparently. And because of that its very easy to take a movement like Alt.NET and cast it into something it wasn’t intended to be. At the core, Alt.NET is about moving developers from good to great. And I find it sad when the Alt.NET community forgets that.