Speakers: Gregor Kiczales The third and final day of ooPSLA 2007 began with Gregor Kiczales speaking about a theme that has underlay his work throughout the years, from the metaobject protocol and objects to aspect-oriented programming: the role played by context in how people see software when they come to it as developer, user, maintainer, and extender. His keynote address was titled Context, Perspective and Programs ....
Speakers: Pattie Maes The ooPSLA 2007 keynote series closed with Pattie Maes talking about Meta-Objects for the World Around Us . Her talk was a fitting bookend to Kiczales's address in the morning, as Maes described ongoing work at the MIT Media Lab to make available all of the information available to people when they need it as they live their lives -- "users" using data and services in context. Maes's topic also offered a fitting close to ooPSLA, which has always ultimately been about making...
Speakers: David Lorge Parnas A day of pioneers speaking at ooPSLA 2007 ended with another seminal thinker in software engineering, David Parnas, talking about Precise Software Documentation: Making Object Orientation Work Better . In keeping with one of the longstanding themes of his work, Parnas argues that for a true separation of concerns, one that extends to documents we create for programmers and for people who will never read our code....
Speaker: Frederick Brooks The second day of ooPSLA 2007 opened with a keynote by computing pioneer Frederick Brooks, the author of the classic The Mythical Man-Month . His talk is on Collaboration and Telecollaboration in Design .
Speakers: John McCarthy The ooPSLA 2007 keynote series continued with John McCarthy, the creator of Lisp and a pioneer of so many fundamental ideas in programming languages. He spoke on one of his recent language projects, Elephant 2000: A Programming Language Based on Speech Acts .
Speakers: Jim Purbrick & Mark Lentczner The third ooPSLA 2007 keynote of the opening day is by Jim Purbrick & Mark Lentczner, the creators of the increasingly influential Second Life. Their talk is titled Second Life: The World's Biggest Programming Environment .
Speakers: Guy Steele & Richard Gabriel The first day of ooPSLA 2007 ended with treat, Guy Steele & Richard Gabriel talking about the lessons we can learn from Programming Languages past in 50 in 50 . If you've ever attended a talk by either Steele or Gabriel at an ooPSLA, then you know that their "talks" are so much more. This is the one ooPSLA keynote that probably loses some of its impact as a podcast, but we think you'll want to hear it for its content!...
Speaker: Peter Turchi For the first time, ooPSLA is podcasting its keynote talks. Watch this page for the full line-up! Opening the conference is acclaimed poet Peter Turchi, with Once Upon a Time, Like Never Before : The Challenge of Telling the Next Story .
Speaker: Kathy Sierra The second ooPSLA 2007 keynote features author, teacher, and A-list blogger Kathy Sierra, on Creating Passionate Users .
Guest: Cheryl Morris, Alex Orso, Li-Te Chang, Martin Robillard Host: Martin Lippert Over the last few years, Eclipse has grown from a simple little IDE into a platform for developing software that can be used at many levels of complexity. At OOPSLA 2002, IBM announced the first round of Eclipse Innovation Grants, which funded 49 academics and researchers to do explore the uses of Eclipse in their work. These projects expanded the base of the software platform, but it also created something just ...
Guest: Ted Neward Host: Daniel Steinberg Anyone who develops software for a living, or who works for an organization that does, knows the challenge of keeping up with changes in technology. Tools change. Methodologies change. Frameworks change. Languages change. For us, change is a central fact of life. Even when a software developer is not being driven by change, she faces a daunting task. The world of computer science is big, as is the world of software development. No matter how much we know,...
Guest: Bill Pugh Host: Daniel Steinberg Bill Pugh, a computer science professor at the University of Maryland, is on a quest. As an academic, it is sometimes too easy to lose touch with the issues that face software developers in the trenches. He doesn't want to fall victim to this risk. Then again, folks who know Pugh's work would never suggest that he has. Pugh is the author of a program called FindBugs, a static analysis tool for detecting errors in Java programs. It has famously found severa...
Guest: Gerard Meszaros Host: Martin Lippert Perhaps the greatest contribution of the agile methods community to software development has been the practice of automated unit testing: the writing of tests by programs that help to specify, document, and verify the code in our systems. Automated unit tests make possible other practices, such as refactoring and collective code ownership, and they help us to ensure a high-level of qaulity in our product. Tests are great, but we must keep in mind that ...
Guest: Jutta Eckstein Host: Daniel Steinberg Agile software development methods grew up in a context of in-house development, collocated teams, and relatively shared cultural expectations. This made their emphasis on face-to-face communication and common code ownership. But these days, software development is as likely to be developed by international teams as it is by teams sitting in the same room. Terms such as "outsourcing", "offshoring", and "nearshoring" indicate the degree to which agile ...
Guest: Dan Grossman Host: Markus Völter Programming languages researcher Dan Grossman from the University of Washington works on making programs safe in the context of shared memory and multi-core processors. Such research operates both at the language level and at the level of the hardware, which gives researchers such as Grossman a wide perspective on the techniques we use in building safe, reliable software systems. At ooPSLA, Grossman will deliver an essay titled The Transactional Memory / G...
Guest: Juha Pekka-Tolvanen Host: Daniel Steinberg Every application domain has its own language. It has vocabulary, rules, and constraints. Historically, we have written software by implementing these vocabulary terms, rules, and constraints in a "high-level language" such as C++ or Java, or using a modeling language such as UML. What gets Juha Pekka-Tolvanen of MetaCase out of bed every morning is a desire to improve in a fundamental way the productivity of software developers. He draws inspira...
Guest: Gary McGraw Host: Michael Kircher Software security is an issue that everyone faces but that not everyone gets right. Sometimes, our languages programming claim to provide us a level of security that they cannot deliver. Fortunately, folks like Gary McGraw, the CTO of Cigital, have studied software, language technology, and security. McGraw defines software security as "how to approach computer security if you are a software developer or architect". In his experience, the best way to buil...
Guest: Jens Coldewey Host: Dan Steinberg In many domains and contexts, agile development is an accepted way to build software. How can we adapt agile methods to contexts in which they've not traditionally been used? Can we do that and succeed? Developers in some contexts face different challenges. On some projects, teams are widely distributed across the globe. In others, developers work on embedded systems or other systems with high reliability demands, in which detailed up-front specification ...
Guest: Michael Stal Host: Bernd Kolb Every system has an architecture -- even if you just start writing code. As systems grow in size, importance, and responsibility, though, Siemens' Michael Stal believes that a systematic approach to defining and nurturing the shape of a system is the only way to ensure that the system meets all of its requirements. These include not just the explicit requirements understood by the client and developer, but also the implicit requirements that often go undocume...
Guest: Glenn Vanderburg Host: Daniel Steinberg The Ruby programming language has taken the software world by storm, as scripting language, as development language, and as the host of the influential Rails web development framework. Programmers who come to Ruby are surprised by their productivity and freedom -- and by how much fun they have! Becoming an accomplished user of Ruby takes a little practice. One way to jump-start the learning process is to study with a master. To this end, ooPSLA is o...
Guests: Linda Rising, Joe Yoder, and Bob Hanmer Host: Daniel Steinberg When the seminal book Design Patterns made its public debut at ooPSLA 1994, the world of software developers changed forever. Soon everyone wanted to learn patterns and, even better, write patterns -- to document their knowledge of what software to build, and how. That same year, a new sort of conference debuted as well, Pattern Languages of Programs, and in 2007, PLoP continues to provide an opportunity for pattern writers t...
Guest: Martin Odersky Host: Markus Völter Many programmers know that there are paths to increased productivity that are orthogonal to objects. Language designer Martin Odersky is in the vanguard that studies how to augment OOP with techniques from the world of functional programming. His most recent work is on Scala , a programming language that "tries to achieve a fusion of object-oriented and functional programming, while remaining compatible with mainstream platforms such as Java and .NET. At...
Guests: Dennis Mancl, Steven Fraser, and Bill Opdyke Host: Markus Völter Objects were not the silver bullet to solve all of our problems building software. Why not? Are there are silver bullets on the horizon? ooPSLA regulars Dennis Mancl, Steven Fraser, and Bill Opdyke have been thinking about these and many related questions for a number of years. They have also been working in industry to come up with better answers. At ooPSLA 2007, Dennis, Steven, and Bill are leading a workshop titled No Si...
