Short Takes: January 1, 2009

By SD Times News Team

January 2, 2009 —

Stroustrup on education
When Bjarne Stroustrup talks, we listen. And when Bjarne decries the training of software developers in our colleges and universities, we need to do something about it.

Bjarne, of course, is the designer of C++. After working for 24 years at Bell Labs, he became a professor of computer science at Texas A&M University in 2002. Bjarne was interviewed by James Maguire of Datamation on the topic of computer science education. In the interview, Bjarne describes some of the problems:

Take a simple example: A friend of mine looked at the final projects of a class of third-year CS students from a famous university. Essentially all had their code littered with “magic constants.” They had never been taught that was bad style—in fact, they had never been taught about programming style because the department “taught computer science, not programming.” That is, programming was seen as a lowly skill that students either did not need or could easily pick up on their own.

Bjarne believes that “few students see code as anything but a disposable entity needed to complete the next project and get good grades. Much of the emphasis in teaching encourages that view.” Ouch!

He advises students: Programming is part of software development. It doesn’t matter how fancy your code is unless it solves the right problem and you can explain it to others. So brush up on your communication skills. Learn to listen, to ask good questions, to write clearly and to present clearly. Serious programming is a team sport; brush up on your social skills. The sloppy fat geek computer genius semi-buried in a pile of pizza boxes and cola cans is a mythical creature, best buried deep, never to be seen again.

Read the interview. Tell me what you think: Do computer science departments do a good job of teaching software development?             — Alan Zeichick

Can Microsoft act like a startup again?
Microsoft is in a unique position to seed the Windows Azure cloud. It has the resources to nurture the development of services that are built on its platforms. That is a win-win proposition for Microsoft and its partners.

In its early days, developers had access to all levels of Microsoft, and they received the attention they felt they needed. The company now has many layers of management, and it resembles IBM more than it does the Microsoft of yesteryear.

Microsoft has the unique opportunity to behave like a startup again, and the cash reserves to make it happen. Competing cloud infrastructure developers cannot match its ability to spend. All it will take is a pilot program to start. I hope that Microsoft does it, and talented developers get a chance at success as a result.             — David Worthington

Never gonna give this up
Maybe I'm a bit slow on the uptake, but I recently found out all about the wonderful concept of rickrolling. For those of you who don’t know what a rickroll is, let me explain. It’s when someone, usually a prankster friend or colleague, sends you a disguised link to the music video to Rick Astley’s 1987 pop single “Never Gonna Give You Up.” So you will be sitting there expecting to be linked to something totally different, and out of the blue comes the rangy, British singer who had been pretty much dormant for the past 20 years until the rickrolling phenomenon revived him.

To admit a guilty pleasure, I’ve always liked that song, even if it bubbles over with cheesiness. I even remember watching the video as a 6- or 7-year-old when it first came out. So I can certainly say let those rickrolls keep rollin’!             — Jeff Feinman

A true advent
The Engelbart Demo in 1968 was a unique event in the timeline of computing. There will never be another event like it. We are so far down the path toward digital enlightenment that there is no longer enough room for the sort of blanket innovation that the ARC team created.

In our current world, innovation tends to mean a new social network or the latest online videogame. But Engelbart understood what it took to make real leaps and bounds in his efforts, and modern computers make his strategy too daunting. The ARC team approached their goals as systemic problems, requiring the completely original construction of everything from the ground up. That meant more than just building new languages and development tools. That meant building the computing environment from the hardware up.

It took five years to develop everything seen in the 1968 demo, and it was all done on machines that had no more than a few kilobytes of memory. Today, the amount of horsepower available would cause research teams to feel obligated to add all those useless bells and whistles that have passed for UI innovation in the past 10 years. Unfortunately, SVG transforms on desktop windows as they are minimized is simply not an innovative feature. Not when compared to the invention of the drop-down menu. — Alex Handy

Related Search Term(s): cloud computing, professional development, Microsoft

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Microsoft's plans for post-Windows OS revealed A componentized non-Windows operating system is in the works at Microsoft, one that could eventually phase out Windows. The OS features asynchronous-only architecture built for task concurrency.

Third-party tools showcased at Professional Developers Conference ComponentOne has a new development kit for the iPhone and the iPod Touch, while Infragistics created a version of NetAdvantage for Silverlight. Also, Developer Express and Microsoft announced a joint code-quality effort for C#.

Microsoft touts Visual Studio’s cross-platform reach At TechEd, the company touted solutions by its partners that permit Visual Studio to work on platforms other than Windows. These platforms include Java and .NET.

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