There's a bit of a buzz on the interwebs, that Microsoft's project to compete with the iPhone is having some problems.
What I find ironic is that they decided to call this project "Pink". Apple once had a project with the same name, which was to be the 'new' operating system for the Macintosh, as a replacement for System 7. Pink was to be an operating system built around an application framework which was to provide the API. This was a popular 'strategic' idea in those days, Apple, IBM and, yes even Microsoft were pursuing it.
Apple's Pink attempted to take the ideas from MacApp which had just made the transition from Object Pascal to C++, and grow them into an operating system. Larry Tesler had advocated this and John Sculley, then Apple's presidency during the "inter-regnum" period, had sunk lots of money into the project which was headquartered in the original building where the Macintosh had been developed, when it was the lair of the "Dread Pirate" Job's merry band. The project had gotten bogged down, and Sculley was on the verge of killing it, unless other 'investors' could be found. Since IBM was enamored with such things back then, a task-force was dispatched to Cupertino to look at Pink. I was tapped for the task-force because of my expertise in Object Oriented programming and visibility due to my connections with VisualAge and Smalltalk, Despite whatever technical misgivings which might have resulted, in other words they didn't listen to me, IBM bought in. The result was an alliance which formed two jointly companies which were jointly owned by IBM and Apple, Kaleida which focused on multi-media, and Taligent led by IBM Executive Joe Gugliemi, where Pink died a slow death. The longest term impact of the alliance was that it got Apple to agree to switching from the Motorola 68K family of microprocessors, which had been used in Macs until then, to the IBM PowerPC. But, since Motorola was a large IBM customer, IBM licensed the PowerPC to them, so that most Macs used IBM architected chips actually produced by Motorola until the "Dread" Pirate came back and eventually switched to using Intel chips.
Of course Microsoft's "Pink" has no relation to Apple's other than the name, but I can't help but finding this all ironic.
In my thirty-two year career at IBM, I can’t begin to count how many times I was bothered by
the IBM software development process.
When I started, in 1974, I found myself trying to swim under the waterfall. Everything
hinged on “Requirements Documents,” “Initial Functional Specs,” “Design Reviews,” etc.
Managers were constantly wanting line of code estimates. Far more effort was wasted on
process rather than progress. Sometimes the process overhead was fatal. My first project at
IBM was part of IBMs major initiative in the 1970s to replace the IBM/370 with a new system
called “FS”. One of my heroes at the time was John Sowa who worked in the architecture
department and whose role seemed to be the resident iconoclast. In one of his memorable
memos available on his web site,
John made the observation that the system architecture specification comprised fifteen
registered IBM confidential documents, each with an individual need to know. A fact which
effectively prevented anyone in the company from understanding the system
and its problems.
So, it should be no surprise that I came to an appreciation of what are now called
agile methods, early on in my career, and fought for the processes and technologies which
enable agility inside IBM, and evangelized such approaches to IBM customers.
Fred George was one of my allies during part of this struggle. Fred was a middle-level IBM
manager who came to the IBM lab in Cary, NC about the time we started using Smalltalk, and
I was developing a prototype application development tool which morphed into VisualAge.
I worked in Fred’s organization and claim influencing him on dynamic OO technology, and agile
methods.
Fred now works for ThoughtWorks, and blogs about agile methods. Recently he has been
writing about how to push back against bean-counting. I get the sense that Fred shared
many of my frustrations with the old IBM process.
<iframe align = “right”, src=“http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=denhaven2com-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0201184621&fc1=000000&IS2=1<1=_blank&lc1==E50707&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr&npa=1” style=“width:120px;height:240px;” scrolling=“no” marginwidth=“0” marginheight=“0” frameborder="0">
Most programmers these days are familiar with, or at least aware of the now classic
“Gang of Four” book Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software
One of the recurring arguments about design patterns is how they relate to individual programming languages. The “Gang of Four,” Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides, were by majority, proponents of strongly typed languages. Ralph was the sole representative of Smalltalk and the rest of the dynamic object oriented languages. As a result, The GOF book had and has more resonance with the C++ community and it’s successors. Although there
are some Smalltalk examples in the book, many of the patterns express things which are easier, and in some cases
unnecessary to express in a dynamically typed language. I find this a bit ironic, since the whole patterns movement
seems to have started when Ward Cunningham and Kent Beck, two of the best known Smalltalkers, discovered the work of architect
Christopher Alexander and thought that his approach to building and municipal design could be translated to the
design of software.
As I was browsing today, I was reminded that there is another “Design Patterns” book,
“The Design Patterns Smalltalk Companion” by Sherman Alpert, Bobby Woolf, and Kyle Brown.
Which might be of interest to not just Smalltalkers
but also Rubyists, since it approaches the subject from they dynamic language point of view. It’s not easy to find, but Amazon has a few copies in stock.
Sherm was one of the researchers in the IBM User Interface Institute
which was housed in the same building where
John Vlissides and Richard Helm of the “GOF” worked,
the IBM Watson Research center in
Yorktown Heights, NY. I spent quite a bit of time with Sherman and the rest of the UI institute team under John T.
Richards back in the late-1980s to early 1990s.
Bobby and Kyle were OO consultants, who I also knew through Knowledge Systems Corp.
You never know what you might learn from the old Smalltalkers.