Programming

I am happy to have checked Reddit the other day because through it I found three beautiful essays by Mike Tarver and one by Larry Wall:

• Why I am Not a Professor OR The Decline and Fall of the British University – Gasp! I am amazed by the parallels between what Mike Tarver writes and what we are doing here in Mauritius. Ok… some parts are a little bit caricatural but I’m 100% with him when he says that the University level programmes should be much tougher than what they are now. I wonder what percentage of my UoM students would have managed to succeed if they were given the exams I had when I was in France ten years ago… I’ll be even bolder: Universities should be elitist!
• Hackers and Fighters – Is there a correlation between studying computer science and knowing about computers? Is a street programmer better than the computer science graduate? Is there a way to teach programming so that a computer science graduates become as good (if not better) than a street programmer?
• The Bipolar Lisp Programmer – Having read this article, I must now confess that I am Bipolar! A Bipolar has “intellectual acuteness and [does] not [take] things seriously. The not taking things seriously goes with finding it all pretty easy and a bit dull. But also it goes with realising that a lot of human activity is really pretty pointless, and when you realise that and internalise it then you become cynical and also a bit sad”. Mike Tarver refers to the Lisp community in his article and it’s now obvious why I am such a big fan of Scheme and Haskell…
• Perl, the first postmodern computer language – It is easy to guess that this one has been written by Larry Wall. And it is beautiful! Before reading the article, I did not like Perl (even after having read Programming Perl). After reading the article, I want to give Perl a chance to convince me once more… I’ll definitely buy Learning Perl. The article focusses on the difference between a modern programming language and a postmodern programming language. Postmodern? How can that exist? In fact, Larry Wall argues that the modernists oversimplify problem solving. Modernists puts the focus squarely on the hammer and the nail. He says that a good postmodern problem solver uses different tools to solve different problems hence the necessity for something like Perl.

(Beautiful photo by Doorgesh!!!)

I’ve decided to teach Software Architecture at MSc level (hurray!). This is the first time of my life I’m going to teach at that level and (believe it or not) I’m looking forward to it.

Teaching at Masters level is somewhat different from teaching at Bachelor level. For one, the students are more mature and therefore more autonomous. No need for me to read my slides to them anymore.

A second difference is that an MSc is research oriented. As the result, the students are expected to read research papers and discuss about their possible implications. Obviously, this also means that I’ll have to read tons of papers and select those which are really relevant.

I’m not a novice in Software Architecture. In fact, I’m not bad at all… but I’ve bought the two following books because (i) both are excellent (ii) both are recent and (iii) both are available cheaply in the Low Price Edition of Pearson Education (i.e. I might use them as textbooks)

Applying UML and Patterns is written by Craig Larman. This book has earned rave reviews on Amazon and is recommended by people like Alistair Cockburn (one of the fathers of the Agile Manifesto), Martin Fowler (of Refactoring fame) and John Vlissides (one of the Gang of Four and who has just passed away). I’ll start reading it today and I’m sure it’s a hell of a good book on Object-Oriented Analysis and Design. By the way, up to now my favourite book on OOA and OOD is Grady Booch‘s Object-Oriented Analysis and Design with Applications. In some weeks, I’ll tell you which one is better…

The second book is Software Architecture in Practice by Len Bass, Paul Clements and Rick Kazman. To be frank, I do not know those authors and I’ve bought this book because it has got rave reviews on Amazon with appreciations going from “Practical, readable, excellent” to “A Bible for Software Architects”. Part one is on envisioning architecture (the architecture business cycle, what is software architecture?), part two is on creating an architecture (quality, design, documentation), part three is on analyzing architectures and part four is on large-scale architectures. I’m sure to learn a lot from that book!