Day: June 25, 2004

This was posted today on techno.blog(“Dion”): techno.blog(“Dion”): The Brits like to kick a man when he is down… and very funny it is too! Not sure of the source of the images but it is so typical of the British approach to [lack of] success.

Lots of the great and the good around campus today, including AMs and MPs. This is why!

Digital Technium which was Officially Opened Today

Apparently some of our communication’s group PhD students had to look busy at their workstations inside although it was definitely a day to be outdoors!

Martin Fowler mentioned UMLet in his recent article on UmlSketchingTools which I blogged about earlier this week. A paper in which the authors (Auer et al, 2003) describe the ideas behind UMLet is very insightful and pretty much echoes my own experiences of over-blown UML tools in the teaching domain (and I’ve tried ArgoUML, Poseidon CE, Together and Rational Rose with variable — but mostly limited — success over the last three or four years).

I have to say that, although it currently only supports class, object and use-case diagrams, UMLet looks very promising and may well prove to be a winner in next year’s Software Engineering courses. Better yet, UMLet can be used as an Eclipse plugin!

Reference

M. Auer, T. Schurtschenthaler, and S. Biffl (Vienna University of Technology), 2003.

“[A Flyweight UML Modelling Tool for Software Development in Heterogeneous Environments”](http://csdl.computer.org/comp/proceedings/euromicro/2003/1996/00/19960267abs.htm), *29th Euromicro Conference (EUROMICRO’03)*, Sept. 01–06. Balek-Antayla, Turkey. Conference Proceedings Published by IEEE.

Excellent article by Ron Smith on IBM developerWorks on how to set up and use Python with Eclipse and Ant. Will definately be using this to set up Eclipse 3.0 with Python support when the final version is released.

O’Reilly Network interviews the Pragmatic Programmers Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas in OnLamp. Many nuggets including this one:

**ORN**:

Ward Cunningham once told me “With better IDEs, static languages such as Java are almost as easy to program in as dynamic languages.” You’re both fans of the Ruby language, especially when compared to more static languages. Do you think that the potential shift to writing business applications in slightly more dynamic languages such as Java and C# […] is good for programmer productivity and ease, or do those languages not go far enough?

**Dave**:

… Java and C# are not really dynamic in any meaningful way. Memory management is a small part of the picture, but the real gains in these more dynamic languages come from different areas, particularly from a flexible type model and from the ability to metaprogram.

Ultimately, it comes down to ease of expression. If I can express myself in code at a level closer to the problem domain, then I’m going to be more effective, and my code is likely to be easier to maintain and extend…I know some companies are using [problem domain code] with great success. And you know — they’re keeping quiet about it.

Well what a match!

I blame Motson … he couldn’t resist telling us how England had been in this or that situation before and lost! But I’m not gutted because we played well and went down fighting. Roll on the world cup!

[image (c) BBC]