Die Hard?

Rick DeNatale — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 11:24:00 -0400

At the last meeting of the Agile RTP group, I won Michael T. Nygard’s book Release It! which I’m reading as a background task. This morning I ran across this:

Interpreted languages such as Java and Ruby almost never crash. Sure they get application errors, but it’s relatively rare to see the interpreter or virtual machine crash. I still remember when a rogue pointer in C could reduce the whole machine to a navel-gazing heap.

I remember “back in the day” when there were endless arguments between the C++ and Smalltalk advocates. The C++ folks would often quote Bjarne Strroustrup’s fear of flying in an airplane whose flight control system was written in Smalltalk, and threw a “message not understood” exception.

Those of us in the Smalltalk camp found this amusing, since the alternative was a system crash caused by an invalidpointer.

Now maybe Nygard framing rogue pointers in C as a memory means that the problem has been solved, but I seem to recall having seen it recently.

It’s Not Just The Language Stupid

One point here is that pet-features such as strong vs. dynamic typing or garbage collection vs. allegedly more performant[1] manual memory management aren’t panaceas. They can have a major effect on aspects such as easo of development, or tweaking out the last bit of performance, sometimes in non-intuitive ways.

Making robust software requires more than just choosing a language, it requires craftmanship, adherence to best practices for the chosen language(s) and technologies, and a realistic understanding of the challenges at hand.

Release It!

And that’s where we come back Nygard’s book. Although I assume that most of my readers are Rubyists, and Nygard is a Java guru, there is much of value here for anyone concerned with producing robust software that can stand up to the real world.

Based on what I’ve read sofar, and skimming the rest, I can recommend it. If you’re interested you can buy it directly from the Pragmatic Programmers, or via the amazon.com link. The later would help feed the duckdogs who run this site, and lower my distraction from their gowling stomachs.

[1] The “allegedly” will no doubt be explained in further posts here.

Talk Like A Duck: Tag robustness

Die Hard?

It’s Not Just The Language Stupid

Release It!