Hi!

I'm Dave. And, well... this is my blog. But you probably already knew all that.

What's it all about

So.. the title.. "Shift your paradigm!" Just what do I mean by that? It's an exhortation based on the idea of a "Paradigm Shift". OK, some of you may be saying, what exactly do you mean by that? It goes back to Thomas Kuhn in 1962 when he wrote "The Structure of Scientific Revolution". In that work, Kuhn put forth the idea of the Paradigm Shift to illustrate scientific advancement: "intellectually violent revolutions" that occur occasionally. His observation was that scientific advancement was not evolutionary, but rather it was revolutionary. With periods of calm, slow, evolutionary advancement, separated by these rather violent revolutions. These revolutions are, or involve, a paradigm shift: a change from one way of thinking to another.

We can see various paradigm shifts if we look back at history... agriculture (nomadic hunter/gatherers to settled crop-growers), Copernicus (earth-centered to sun-centered), Einstein (Newtonian physics to Relativistic/Quantum physics), The printing press, etc.

Now what's all this got to do with software (and if that didn't occur to you, you may well be here by accident). Well... there are several examples of paradigm shifts in the recent history of computing (albeit not as earth shattering as, say agriculture.. but some on the scale of the printing press maybe):

• the transition of the computer from being (in a) special room to being on your desk... on your lap... or in your hand.
• object oriented programming
• textual to graphical interfaces
• the Internet
• and (based on much of, maybe all of, the above list) pretty much anything Alan Kay has done

Nice history lesson... but what about this blog?

Right.. I was getting to that.

What I want to do here is explore and talk about neat stuff. Specifically, that subset of neat stuff that has potential to fundamentally change how we, as programmers, do our thing... that is... program.

So, I'll be talking about new languages (and some old languages that were ahead of their time then but aren't now), new techniques, technologies, ideas, processes, and practices.

Some examples? OK. Here are some that a flitting about my mind as likely topics.

• Dynamically typed languages like Smalltalk, Python, and Ruby
• Agile Software Development
• eXtreme Programming
• Test-Driven Development
• Aspect Oriented Programming
• Refactoring
• Naked Objects
• and well... lots of stuff I haven't found out about yet.

Hopefully I can occasionally (I'll be quite happy with once) introduce you to a new idea that will change how you program in a revolutionary way. A bit much to ask? Maybe. But sometimes the simplest idea can have incredible effects.

I'm planning to have fun writing here, and I hope that you have fun reading. I won't be getting things proofread or copy-edited before posting... though I will run a spell-check when I remember to.. and I'll try to remember what I learned while sleeping through grammar lessons. This'll be fairly "off the cuff". A thin wrapper over what I happen to be thinking about or playing with at the time. Oh, and I'll post little announcements regarding where I'll be speaking, or conferences I'll be attending, and so forth.