I want no monuments

Despite my deficiencies as a meeting organizer, the January meeting (the very first one this year) has just been closed and it was a good one.

I finally managed to study SoapUI and to briefly show its functionalities in the quickie, while Bruno showed us the new features of Java SE 6: scripting could be real fun… I have to look deeper into it, especially considering my previous post.

As always, all the bits (slides and code) showed and used during the meeting will be available on the JUG wiki page in the coming days.

Now come nearer the monitor, because I prefer to whisper this: next meeting we’ll probably have a new location! Sshhhh!!! Don’t tell anybody!

Yes, I’m Italian. Not really proud of it, expecially in the last weeks. Not really interested in my country’s problems. Not willing to listen to bad news.

As you have read, one of the favourite landing for tourists, Naples, has replaced monuments and sea with waste mountains. You may ask “how can all this waste come from nowhere?”. Indeed, what you may see as a contingent problem, has been a problem for almost a year.

The ironic part is that such story, which the stupid italian politicians fear to damage Italy’s image, has become a “BBC Learning English” lesson.

Willing to find answers to questions such as “how?” or “why?”. Then you have just found a new book for your bookshelf.

After four months doing TDD, trying to understand a data driven application I’m keeping on receiving pats on my back for the good job!

Two managers congratulating me at least once a week for my approach, for my enthusiasm, for the continuous integration box, and me explaining them how these things are making things easier, more robust and more secure.

But…
Today another bug came out from the other part of the application, made by the other team. One of my managers asked me how these all could be avoided and me answering tests! unit, functional, human… just test it!. The answer disarmed my enthusiasm:

Yeah, but then it all costs more money

What? Why the hell have you paid my salary until now? Is it because the money I get is not yours? Are you schizophrenic? To which one of you am I talking?

By the way, now I know how it could be that my coworkers are still not doing TDD.

My managers are probably lying (to me or to themselves) as on the one hand they say something while on the other they do the opposite.

Has anyone seen this pattern and knows how the situation can be changed (apart from resigning, since the contract it’s going to terminate in two months) ?

Today I’ve had the pleasure to read InfoQ^[0] and its comments about Ola Bini’s^[1] opinion about the coming or not of a Next Big Language.

I share Ola’s opinion: no big language for your future, forget it.

Newer apps will be built with a mix of different languages, because each tool is born to solve one or few problems, and usually they are very good at it. Increasing software complexity will lead to a finer grained choice about which language best fits the problem to solve.

Question is: how do these languages communicate? Ola thinks they are all going to live on top of a JVM. That’s probably what will happen. Because that will make things easier.

That leads to the next question: will Java die? No. If we are going to stay in the JVM (and there is already evidence of it: JRuby, Groovy, Scala, Jython…) then we will gently move to these new worlds while keeping on using, developing, improving and investing on our solid code base.

I think no one can really predict the death of a language. We could only throw thoughts about what could change.

Language interoperability and polyglot programming could be good guesses.

A Quad is that thing you can ride as a Vespa, where you get wet as on a Vespa but that stands in queues as a normal car.

Ahahah! Thanks Crozza!