Code Monkeyism

TIOBE Index: Java on top, Python up, Ruby down

2008-11-20T07:53:58Z

Looked at the current November 2008 TIOBE programming language index, found via Cedrics Twitter. Java still on top, very slow slide, C++, C# and especially Python up, PHP still 5th, Erlang at 31st, Scala at 43rd ;-) F# not listed in Top 100.

Other interesting tidbits:
“The object-oriented paradigm is at an all time high with 57.9%. The popularity of dynamically typed languages seems to be stabilizing.”

Object-Oriented Languages  57.9%  +1.6%
Functional Languages       2.6%   +0.4%

Statically Typed Languages 	60.0% 	+1.2%
Dynamically Typed Languages 	40.0% 	-1.2%

(after some big increases for dynamically typed languages since 2002)

A symbiotic relationship: managers and consultants

2008-11-19T09:26:53Z

Why do management consultants get so much money? Why do managers hire consultants? From my experience both as someone who did hire consultants and someone who was hired as a consultant, there are (beside lots of other reasons) three major reasons for hiring consultants. You hire consultants because

you need people for a job (fast or temporary) but can’t hire them yourself (body leasing)
you need special expertise (e.g. m&a) which you don’t have
you outsource decision making and being responsible

The first and second are obvious, but the third one is the most interesting one I think and a major reason for the amount of money in the consulting business.

When your’re a manager, you have mostly two jobs: make decisions and take responsibility. Often you also have a budget. The best you can do now, is hire a consultant with your budget to make the decisions for you and also take the corresponding responsibility. What’s left for you to do? Nothing. Mission accomplished.

Say you’re an IT manager and want to buy a new CRM. You could either look into it, delegate due diligence and make a decision. After the CRM software fails you need to take the responsibility (if you can’t deflect it) and get fired.

Or you could take your budget, hire a consultant who decides for you what system to buy (or what product to build or what market to enter or which competitor to buy, it doesn’t stop with IT decisions). Then you tell everyone “Accenture told me to buy XYZ”. If the software fails, tell everyone “Bain told me so and they have the brightest people. How could I know better?”. This even works when you’re 15 years in the ABC business and the consultant is someone fresh from an ivy league school with no experience. Astonishing.

It also explains why the top consultancies hire the brightest people. Not because they need bright people for their projects. Most consultancies just resell their knowledge again and again, no bright people needed. But

they have the money to hire the best
their clients can fall back to the line “McKinsey has the best people. If they didn’t know XZY wasn’t right, noone could know!”

So this is a very profitable and symbiotic relationship between managers and consultants, which explains why manager outsource their core duties.

Thanks for listening. As ever, please do share your thoughts and additional tips in the comments below, or on your own blog (I have trackbacks enabled).

Unit Testing, TDD and the Shuttle Disaster

2008-11-19T05:41:16Z

I was reading the Feynman report about the Shuttle disaster: “Appendix F - Personal observations on the reliability of the Shuttle” and I was freaked out by the similarities of military engine development and bottom-up, test driven development. There is a small passage in the report about how military engines are built:

The usual way that such engines are designed (for military or civilian aircraft) may be called the component system, or bottom-up design. First it is necessary to thoroughly understand the properties and limitations of the materials to be used (for turbine blades, for example), and tests are begun in experimental rigs to determine those. With this knowledge larger component parts (such as bearings) are designed and tested individually. As deficiencies and design errors are noted they are corrected and verified with further testing. Since one tests only parts at a time these tests and modifications are not overly expensive. Finally one works up to the final design of the entire engine, to the necessary specifications. There is a good chance, by this time that the engine will generally succeed, or that any failures are easily isolated and analyzed because the failure modes, limitations of materials, etc., are so well understood. There is a very good chance that the modifications to the engine to get around the final difficulties are not very hard to make, for most of the serious problems have already been discovered and dealt with in the earlier, less expensive, stages of the process.

This sounds a lot like Unit Testing to me. Writing small parts of an application, testing the part, then integrating it. And even if this is not TDD (not possible with hardware?), then it sound similar, contrary to writing all code first and writing the tests last.

Compare this approach with the way NASA desigened the Shuttle Main Engine:

The Space Shuttle Main Engine was handled in a different manner, top down, we might say. The engine was designed and put together all at once with relatively little detailed preliminary study of the material and components. Then when troubles are found in the bearings, turbine blades, coolant pipes, etc., it is more expensive and difficult to discover the causes and make changes. For example, cracks have been found in the turbine blades of the high pressure oxygen turbopump. Are they caused by flaws in the material, the effect of the oxygen atmosphere on the properties of the material, the thermal stresses of startup or shutdown, the vibration and stresses of steady running, or mainly at some resonance at certain speeds, etc.? How long can we run from crack initiation to crack failure, and how does this depend on power level? Using the completed engine as a test bed to resolve such questions is extremely expensive. One does not wish to lose an entire engine in order to find out where and how failure occurs. Yet, an accurate knowledge of this information is essential to acquire a confidence in the engine reliability in use. Without detailed understanding, confidence can not be attained.

A further disadvantage of the top-down method is that, if an understanding of a fault is obtained, a simple fix, such as a new shape for the turbine housing, may be impossible to implement without a redesign of the entire engine.”

This sounds a lot like traditional, up front software development. With the same problems. When errors occure, “are they caused by flaws in the material [...]“ or where do they come from? It’s hard to decide which component is the root cause of an error in a complex system. Astonishingly Feynman sees another corresponding disadvantage with top-down versus bottom-up. Problems that arise may be too big to fix in a conventional way, the engine architecture needs to be redesigned. This happens with software too. If you do too much up front architecture, you may end with an architecture which doesn’t fit your problems (usually this means a long and difficult rewrite - something you should only do as a last resort). Going bottom up, best with Test Driven Development (TDD), you can’t end with a wrong architecture (with merciless small refactorings and path adjustments on the way of course). And usually you’re flexible enough with an architecture which was driven by unit testing to react to all changes on your way (scalability, performance etc.)

The engine development success and the shuttle problems compared show convincingly how developing in small steps with components and merciless testing results in easy to debug components with a low error rate. You should test more.

Thanks for listening. As ever, please do share your thoughts and additional tips in the comments below, or on your own blog (I have trackbacks enabled).

Experimenting with new layout

2008-11-13T06:58:29Z

I’m playing with a new blog layout. Much simpler than the last, more whitespace. With an urgently needed upgrade of my Wordpress version and some new features like Twitter integration. I’m not yet satisfied with the results, the balance doesn’t look right yet. But overall it’s the right direction, especially with more vertical space for text.

On Twitter

2008-11-12T07:24:52Z

You can now follow me on Twitter, at last :-)

http://twitter.com/codemonkeyism

2nd downtime

2008-11-11T09:13:40Z

My hoster needed a second downtime, to remove the old harddisk (160gb), not sure why he needs that and why it couldn’t stay in the server. Sorry again. And there will be a 3rd downtime, because my hoster found a RAID controller in my server which shouldn’t be there. And he wants to remove the controller and get me a 3rd downtime. How unprofessional.

Update: The support was very supportive, the issues are resolved and no 3rd downtime needed.

9 (ego) shooters I’ve played more or less recently

2008-11-13T12:42:42Z

Some of the ego or third person shooters I’ve played more or less recently (2 years?) and how I liked them, the best one first. If you’re only interested in programming, stop reading.

Half Life 2 + Episode 1 + Episode 2
Best shooter (ever?): Very good story, nice graphics, atmospheric (landscape), memorable scenes (Nova Prospekt, sea side road)
Bioshock
Creepy, very good/dense atmosphere, good story, nice graphics, didn’t like most of the powers, end boss wasn’t that good, didn’t fit the story I think
Resident Evil 4
Shocker, very good game, sometimes very creepy, lots of enemies, replay value because of different level design with different difficulty
Dead Space
Very good graphics, Zero-G and vacuum are stunning, sometimes - too seldom - creepy, I was often reminded of RE4, for example the scene where you have to protect Nicole (and some other scenes). The other game that comes to mind when playing Dead Space is System Shock (one of the best) - for example the elevator scenes, hydroponic and general feel
Metroid Prime 3
Good atmosphere, innovative, I like the Metroid Prime style. Not a shooter, more a 3d action adventure like the old Metroid Primes on the NES/SNES
Portal
Short but innovative and good story - a shooter?
Halo3
Very good story, very film-like, especially the end, I would liked to have more “Ring scenes”
Call of Duty 3
Good action, some very good scenes (battle on the last hill) - too few though
Far Cry
Nice trees, nice plants, large landscape, didn’t like the story very much, the end game was getting worse

I would buy and play all of them again, except perhaps CoD 3 and Far Cry. Probably I’ve forgotten some I’ve played, but then they couldn’t have been that good, could they? And yes, sometimes I play too much (ask my girlfriend ;-) - not that often and not for very long, ego shooters are way too short :-)

Update: Some don’t like Dead Space: “Oh dear Science. It’s so derivative. It’s sooo been done before, that it’s really kind of embarrasing to sit through the story as it unfolds exactly as you’d expect.”

I didn’t expect this to happen. I thought they would more reference half life and the military would come in and shoot everyone. I was suprised ! Other than that, yes it’s predictible. But a nice game.

Downtime

2008-11-09T07:31:16Z

Sorry for the downtime, the hardware upgrade and Debian to Ubuntu migration didn’t work as expected due to mistakes by my hoster. Thanks for coming back.

Grails vs. Rails: A fun comparison

2008-11-04T16:48:59Z

I currently think about the question: “Is Java dead?” with some introspection into what dead means, what Java means, jobs, market and everything else. Playing with Google trends and Indeed, a fun comparison:

rails, grails Job Trends

rails jobs - grails jobs

Inspired by Obie.

Another one I found interesting (Ruby growing in sync with Rails):

rails, ruby Job Trends

rails jobs - ruby jobs

If you feel inclined to comment on the information content of Google trends or relative Indeed comparisons, don’t. There has been enough discussion already and the grain of salt everyone takes is big enough. Thanks.

W-Jax 2008 in Munich

2008-11-04T13:58:35Z

Currently attending the Java/Enterprise/Agile/Osgi/SOA W-Jax 2008 conference in Munich. Really nice up to now.