Focusing on the Wrong Stuff?

One of the best links was to some slides by a presentation from Todd Proebsting.

One slide in particular is worth reproducing in full:

Recent (perpetual?) academic research:

• Type theory
• Functional programming
• Object-oriented programming
• Parallel programming
• Static analysis
• Compiler optimization

Recent adoption: Perl, Python, Visual Basic, Java

• Almost void of innovation on type theory, functional programming, OO programming, optimization, etc!
• Perversely hopeful development for new language design efforts.

The point he was making was that the activities that were popular for researchers were not solving the real problems of practitioners. I see similar problems with a lot of approaches to improving software development productivity. For example, companies are spending a huge amount of resources on developing tooling to simplify the design of domain specific languages when the problem isn’t lack of tooling (an accidental difficulty) but the essential difficulties of language design. I also see companies focusing on creating application generators so you can generate an application “in minutes not months”, without realizing that you also have to have a process and tooling to support the capturing of business requirements in a systematic manner to drive your generator otherwise you’ll be generating applications in minutes but still taking months to specify them.

One of the things that has made SystemsForge such a long term project is that we have been focused on a complete solution – how can you specify and generate custom web applications quickly and cost effectively. I see that as one of the biggest questions in software development today and I’m hoping in 2007 we’ll be able to provide a new vision for specifying and generating a family of powerful, custom web applications – quickly and more cost effectively. Should be an interesting ride!