artima - Articles

CLR Design Choices

by Bill Venners with Bruce Eckel, February 2, 2004 15 messages

Anders Hejlsberg, the lead C# architect, talks with Bruce Eckel and Bill Venners about IL instructions, non-virtual methods, unsafe code, value types, and immutables.

Generics in C#, Java, and C++

by Bill Venners with Bruce Eckel, January 26, 2004 19 messages

Anders Hejlsberg, the lead C# architect, talks with Bruce Eckel and Bill Venners about C# and Java generics, C++ templates, constraints, and the weak-strong typing dial.

The Simplest Thing that Could Possibly Work

by Bill Venners, January 19, 2004 9 messages

Ward Cunningham talks with Bill Venners about complexity that empowers versus complexity that creates difficulty, simplicity as the shortest path to a solution, and coding the simplest thing when you're stuck.

To Plan or Not to Plan

by Bill Venners, January 12, 2004 19 messages

Ward Cunningham talks with Bill Venners about using the programming language, rather than the whiteboard, to design and communicate ideas.

Working the Program

by Bill Venners, January 5, 2004 25 messages

Ward Cunningham talks with Bill Venners about the flattening of the cost of change curve, the problem with predicting the future, and the program as clay in the artist's hand.

Matz on Craftsmanship

by Bill Venners, December 29, 2003 16 messages

Yukihiro Matsumoto, the creator of the Ruby language, talks with Bill Venners about becoming a better programmer through reading code, learning languages, focusing on fundamentals, being lazy, and considering interfaces.

Blocks and Closures in Ruby

by Bill Venners, December 22, 2003 14 messages

Yukihiro Matsumoto, the creator of the Ruby programming language, talks with Bill Venners about two kinds of nameless functions in Ruby, blocks and closures.

Inappropriate Abstractions

by Bill Venners with Bruce Eckel, December 12, 2003 11 messages

Anders Hejlsberg, the lead C# architect, talks with Bruce Eckel and Bill Venners about the trouble with distributed systems infrastructures that attempt to make the network transparent, and object-relational mappings that attempt to make the database invisible. The conversation is also joined by Dan Fernandez, Microsoft's Product Manager for C#, and Eric Gunnerson, C# Compiler Program Manager.

Design by Contract

by Bill Venners, December 8, 2003 8 messages

Bertrand Meyer talks with Bill Venners about Design by Contract and the limits of formal languages for expressing contracts.

Collective Ownership of Code and Text

by Bill Venners, December 1, 2003 6 messages

Ward Cunningham talks with Bill Venners about how he designed wiki to be a model for collective code ownership, collective incentives for pride of ownership, and how to deal with disagreements by eliminating the cost of making mistakes.

Modern C++ Style

by Bill Venners, November 24, 2003 14 messages

Bjarne Stroustrup talks with Bill Venners about using multiple inheritance and pure abstract classes, multi-paradigm programming, and the technique of resource acquisition is initialization.

Dynamic Productivity with Ruby

by Bill Venners, November 17, 2003 9 messages

Yukihiro Matsumoto, the creator of the Ruby programming language, talks with Bill Venners about morphing interfaces, using mix-ins, and the productivity benefits of being concise in Ruby.

Visualizing Complexity

by Bill Venners, November 10, 2003 5 messages

James Gosling talks with Bill Venners about visualizing software designs and understanding large-scale distributed systems.

Contracts and Interoperability

by Bill Venners with Bruce Eckel, November 3, 2003 7 messages

Anders Hejlsberg, the lead C# architect, talks with Bruce Eckel and Bill Venners about DLL hell and interface contracts, strong names, and the importance of interoperability.

The Demand for Software Quality

by Bill Venners, October 27, 2003 14 messages

Bertrand Meyer talks with Bill Venners about the increasing importance of software quality, the commercial forces on quality, and the challenges of complexity.