Met a cool chap called Tom White tonight, at the London Java Meetup,
who works for a travel info feed company [kizoom].
He raised the very interesting (to me) topic of long termism
and it's impact in the software arena. Mostly the issues
regarding long term storage of digital media, e.g. average CD-R
lifespan around 20 years or so, but more interestingly the
loss of code and data from only 40 years ago.
Are we beginning
to reach the time when the original babbage-like coders are starting
to die off, and useful code from the 60s is degrading on
magnetic tape in a locked filing cabinet somewhere.
Is fashion and short-termism in software endangering useful lessons
learned in the past? What is being done to archive everything in
the long-long term?
I myself have tried to remake
Elite and rescued an Atari/400 game,
but with everyone's obsession with little
green bits of paper, should we look up a bit higher sometimes
and think about the bigger things.
Tom mentioned
The Clock of the Long Now as being particularly relevant...
The Java Syntactic Extender was mentioned in passing, as Tom maintains this funky system for extending Java without tricky JSR requests, which I really must have a play with...
Simon mentioned TagUnit, which appears to be a test harness for
use during development of your own jsp taglibs. Essentially
providing a simple way to deploy your new tags into any
J2EE compliant webapp container, without worrying about the
specific platform details, cool.
Someone described the difficulties of using
xml enumeration's as a
non-type-safe style method of representation of xml schema, and
the issues this brings into play with regard to future proofing
the code that deals with these xml documents. i.e. it breaks
down radically, a stark reminder to us all that the current trend
towards flexibility/loose coupling at the cost of well declared
structure comes at a long-term cost, which your replacement will
eventually hate you for...
Mark Fowler (not a fowlbot) described the new Inline::Java stuff
in Perl, and how easy it is to talk both ways between the two languages.
Perl6 is going all VM on us, but their VM [Parrot] will kick the
donkey off the Java VM, particularly for targeting dynamically typed
lingo's at it. Looking forward to having a play with that.
[JVM,CLR and Parrot, any more Runtime Environments I need to bulk
my deliverables up with...]
Jeff Martin of xmlunit fame, talked about the holes in the mobile phone MMS specification and how it can reach up and bite ya, I feel your pain Jeff...
Pratik says JavaPolis on 3/4 Dec [Antwerp] is gonna rock, with Mr.Gosling himself in attendance...
The Xmas party venue was discussed, and will be scouted during the
month by Sam, myself and others, so any suggestions for suitable venues
capable of holding around 40+ people on 15 Dec would be appreciated
[we have no money, but there was a lot of drinking tonight, so we should
make some bartender happy...]
I'll put formative details up soon on the londonjava site for the Xmas party, and throw bits at it during the month, till it takes better shape. I'll
try and send out the invites...
Anyways, thanks so much to all the people for poppin along, hopefully you
can all make it on Dec 15th for a bit of festive cheer...
17 Nov 2003
