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It's not only pretty, it's functional. It's impossible to open, so there's little chance of you spoiling your computer with Vista.

And high-tech companies--stop messing with us on your treadmill of upgrades while making the old stuff obsolete. It may be that any software company that didn't routinely upgrade its product would go out of business. But what if the rest of the world worked this way? Oh, I lost a sock. I need to get a whole new wardrobe because the replacement sock is version 2.0.1, and the stores now only sell version 2.0.3.

What kind of moronic moderator doesn't recognize parody and sarcasm?

Mistake number 5. The "We'll Ship It When It's Ready" syndrome. Which reminds me. What the hell is going on with Mozilla? I made fun of them more than a year ago because three years had passed and the damn thing was still not out the door.

There's an apropos Joel on Software article from a few years back

I think I first read about that theory six years ago at joelonsoftware.

If you are starting with a good database, MapReduce is definitely a step backwards. But that isn't what MapReduce is designed to replace. In reality, MapReduce replaces the for loop, and viewed from that perspective, it is a major step forward. Most languages (C, C++, Java, etc.) define the for loop and other iteration facilities in such a way that the compiler can seldom safely parallelize the loop. MapReduce gives the programmer an easy way to convert probably 90% of their for loops into highly scalable code.

You may also want to consider this story, and consider that you might not have to completely open-source your software to satisfy your paying customers.

But from a quality-of-product point-of-view, very little could match (and can match) SimCity
Well, except for the use after free bug that required a special case in Windows 95 so that the game would keep working.
See e.g. here (look for SimCity):
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html

I agree that fortresses guarded by secretaries are the opposite end of the spectrum and no good either. The English are still pretty good (or bad) at that. If you look at some of the big guys who dig deep into this like IBM or Microsoft, they end up with a small cluster of offices spanning a central meeting area. See for example:
http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/171/ibmsj1701C.pdf
Or even:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BionicOffice.html

It does if those people actually turn out. It doesn't otherwise. They can't help fix the code if they can't see the code though. OSS is a security opportunity, and not one that's necessarily fulfilled.

There are advantages to having the code open besides security, too. Code reuse, code clarity, project longevity, and more can be helped by having more than one small team working on code.

There are two situations in which OSS helps most. One is the small team that opens their code because even a few outside helpers is a significant increase in programmers. Many projects, including the Linux kernel, start out this way.

The other is when a project becomes popular enough or gets close enough to meeting enough people's needs that large groups of programmers and major commercial and noncommercial organizations start working on the code. Here each additional programmer is statistically less significant to the overall project numbers, but the total number of people is bigger than you'd expect a development team at even a large company to contain. This is where Linux is now, with almost 2,000 developers in a fairly recent version. Sure, they're not all working on the Linux kernel full-time, but that's still a lot of eyeballs on the code.

Lots of commercial software isn't written by Microsoft, SCO, IBM, Novell, CA, Adobe, Apple, and the other big corporate software houses. Lots of it, too, is written by small teams in small companies or by in-house people supporting some other industry. Most of it is, in fact. While there are many types of software development targets, there are vanishingly few companies that have hundreds of programmers working on a single system of software. Most of the projects in the world that get hundreds of programmers involved are written, in fact, as OSS or in one of just a handful of companies.

The biggest reason OSS is so important is not necessarily because it presents a challenge to companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Adobe although OS and office suite alternatives are always nice. It's because if companies with 2 or 20 programmers who have the start of something good can have just one bug fixed by each of another 2 or 20 programmers and another company can pick up that program and develop it further without redoing the work of those 2 or 20 programmers, those things are really significant at that scale.

The title might be misleading, the authors says Java is important in learning to code!

I am myself a Java developer and I started when the language was born.

Nevertheless, I can understand where the professors are coming from when they state:

Students found it hard to write programs that did not have a graphic interface, had no feeling for the relationship between the source program and what the hardware would actually do, and (most damaging) did not understand the semantics of pointers at all, which made the use of C in systems programming very challenging.

I started to write Java programs with vi (now using eclipse ;-) and I would say that it is indeed necessary to understand pointers to write complex (especially multi-threaded) Java programs. Somebody not understanding pointers will have no idea that every Java Object (even arrays) are accessed through references which is indeed a fancy name for a pointer. So all Java variables except primitive types behave just like a pointer would. I can't see how one could be an expert in Java without understanding this!

I see the point for teaching C and at minimum a few other languages (I did lisp, prolog, ml, assembly for Intel and Motorola and a few others). I am just surprised they don't suggest also at least one assembly language as mandatory.

A student would also need to learn at least a minimum on how the hardware works, (hardrive, processor, cache, bus, memory, etc.)

Why ? Because knowing all the components (hardware and software), knowing the machine and all the layers is the only way to be able to write efficient programs !

We are supposed to have nice abstractions to work more easily knowing only a few layers but in my experience this is a myth and this is how we end up with trashy programs, when the person who wrote it didn't have a clue on how the other layers worked and the nasty impact his code would have on those other layers.

Here is a 2002 article that explains the phenomenon a little more, it is called the Leaky Abstractions

If we are not aware of this, we end up forming "fast-food" programmers instead of the software engineers of tomorrow. I guess that's what the professors were saying.

Then again, in a sense, nothing new here ;-) I have been knowing this for a long time and my guess is that I am not alone ! ;-)

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchools.html

His version of Hungarian notation was a bit different from the one used now. For him, it wasn't type as in string vs. int vs. pointer to a long, it was about different kinds of data within types. For instance, a string guaranteed to be valid & null terminated would have one prefix and a string with no such guarantee could have another.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Wrong.html

sName and nCount is a bit of a perversion on that theme, given that a good IDE will show you the type if you want it and a compiler will throw errors everywhere if you use the wrong type. Arguably, things like typedef also make Simonyi's Hungarian obsolete.

Quicktime player won all sorts of awards for "design" but it's a total piece of crap. All form and zero function - unbelievably basic mistakes/problems. Take the opinion of fashion designers with a pinch of salt.

A book...? How about Joel Spolsky's "User Interface design for programmers"?

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000057.html

"I've always hated writing user interfaces, and graphical user interfaces in particular."

In that case why bother? Leave it to one of the many people who have a clue and give a damn.

If your job is putting pixels in front of people then you should be executing a design process that leads to a user interface - not spraying pixels onto the application as an afterthought.

You will find the most famous authors on the topic listed at the Userati site. However if you want to get a feel for the topic, go read Joel on Software's Dickensian account of his days in the bread factory - and remember thats the user experience you're condemning your users to if you dont care enough about the subject.

Joel Spolsky's User Interface Design for Programmers points out numerous user interface design issues that are non-obvious to programmers. I highly recommend it.

I personally found "User Interface Design for Programmers" by Joel Spolsky to be an excellent resource. A fellow developer suggested it to me after experience some of my option-laden interfaces, and it actually did change my ideas of how a UI should be designed so that others can actually use it. It's all about concepts; it has no code and is not specific to a particular OS or UI toolkit. Some of the examples don't even have to do with computers.

If you want to check it out, the author has the http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000057.htmlfirst chapter on his web site.

-- Joe

+1 for Joel. +10, actually, if I'm allowed. I really recommend reading the above linked (online, free) book. And if you've got the time, you should pretty much read everything he's ever written. Even his stories about buying office furniture or shipping packages has little hints and clues, not about GUIs per se, but about all the little things that make any experience good or bad. And there's lots of good other stuff too, like dealing with people, creative approaches to problem solving, etc.

Even when he's wrong, the stories are still good. He has a series called 'Working on CityDesk' that has lots of little bits of good info. Despite the fact that his company's web-editing app CityDesk tanked ("nobody wants to compose in a big TEXTAREA on an HTML page") and they now focus on selling the bug-tracking software that they originally developed for in-house use, there is still a lot of good info. I love this bit about XML and databases. (About 2/3 the way down.)

And one other important thing to remember is to NOT go all by one source. Find some others. (Joel frequently mentions others in the industry.) As we saw above, Joel was as wrong as could be, and Norman, despite having lots and lots of good info, is a little too detached from reality most of the time. Forget Designing Web Usability, go read Design of Everyday Things instead.

+1 for Joel. +10, actually, if I'm allowed. I really recommend reading the above linked (online, free) book. And if you've got the time, you should pretty much read everything he's ever written. Even his stories about buying office furniture or shipping packages has little hints and clues, not about GUIs per se, but about all the little things that make any experience good or bad. And there's lots of good other stuff too, like dealing with people, creative approaches to problem solving, etc.

Even when he's wrong, the stories are still good. He has a series called 'Working on CityDesk' that has lots of little bits of good info. Despite the fact that his company's web-editing app CityDesk tanked ("nobody wants to compose in a big TEXTAREA on an HTML page") and they now focus on selling the bug-tracking software that they originally developed for in-house use, there is still a lot of good info. I love this bit about XML and databases. (About 2/3 the way down.)

And one other important thing to remember is to NOT go all by one source. Find some others. (Joel frequently mentions others in the industry.) As we saw above, Joel was as wrong as could be, and Norman, despite having lots and lots of good info, is a little too detached from reality most of the time. Forget Designing Web Usability, go read Design of Everyday Things instead.

You mean that they consistently change where things are for no good reason, between versions of Windows? Because I have to say, that's my favorite feature when Windows-users look to me for support and I don't have a VMware image in front of me. It'd be one thing if I had to support it full-time, but even though I've used every version of Windows since 3.11, it's no longer my primary operating system, and hasn't been for years. (In fact, I seldom use it outside of VMware). Trust me, it's a pain remembering that feature x is located one place, in Windows 2000 Professional, and usually one or two menus deeper with XP. Ranting about Vista, on the other hand, would take forever.

And GUI consistency? Please. Have you tried running Microsoft Money on Windows 2000? How about Windows Media Player on any version of Windows? Microsoft is great at making applications that look nothing like the GUI when it suits them to do so. Perhaps they've made some improvements, here and there, but they still has a lot to learn when it comes to GUI consistency.

Look at this before you try to tell us of how "consistent" the Windows GUI is:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/11/21.html

I would also recommend:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/fog0000000249.html

It is insightful and short... only useful as a starting point for thinking about these issues, of course, but worth a read.

Joel Spolsky wrote "User Interface Design for Programmers" which discusses exactly what you are asking. Not the technical aspects of the API, but the Human Interface aspects that make an interface easy-to-use, intuitive, and useful.

Here is the Amazon link

He was also nice enough to put the book online for free: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000057.html

I particularly User Interface Design for Programmers by Joel Spolsky.

If you're designing web software, then read through the archives of Use It by Don Norman. I don't like his books - Designing Web Usability is the only paperback I've ever bought that had usability issues! But he's mostly on the ball.

Joel Spolsky has written an online book called User Interface Design for Programmers that I find pretty good http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000057.html/. There is also a longer print version that has more content, but I haven't had the chance to read it yet.

Mick

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BionicOffice.html

Joel of Joel on Software has written a few article on this subject. You might want to check out what he did.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/

Since I haven't seen Joel on Software's "Bionic Office" article yet, I'll post it here. The big takeaway: minimize noise and maximize convenience.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BionicOffice.html

By now you've probably seen a lot of the brouhaha over a bug in the newest version of Excel, 2007. Basically, multiplying 77.1*850, which should give you 65,535, was actually displaying 100,000.

Apple has had cleartype type technology for a long time probably all through OS X, disregarding patents.
I always thought it was laughable looking at XP, how there was so much aliasing in the text and interface

So I thought Vista would look better which it did slightly, but some brand new pcs I've seen had all there antialiasing flicker when you moved the page and occasionally while stationary :)

Different perspectives of apple and windows people though...
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/06/12.html

Tabs are more efficient than windows - only one copy of the browser ui is present

And all of the pages I'm looking at go away when that one browser crashes. Nice.

There is no need to initialize yet another copy of the ui when you want to see a link without loosing the current page, and destroy it when you'r done

You act as if I'm doing some work; its the computer doing what it does best, running another application.

It's easier to switch between a browser and another application, than to switch betweeen 300 open browser windows and another application

Which is why I never open 300 browser windows; or 300 windows of anything, for that matter. I close what i don't need. I don't need 300 web pages all at once, I can only read one at a time.

Basicaly, MDI (and tabs are a kind of MDI) UIs were invented for a reason, and have their use cases
And i find it irritating that many other applycations switched from MDI to SDI in the last years (eg: ms office, nero) ... grrr...

MDI sucks, there's a reason everyone is pushing to get rid of it. Even MS is encouraging we leave MDI behind.

http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?design.4.181903.38

Enter the business schools. Managers start believing they can command any corporation without understanding how the production works. They start doing things like transplanting a CEO from Pepsi to Apple. Dismal results.

Oddly enough the other day I read an article from an ex Microsoft guy making the same point -

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html

It's the same with CSS and so on as far as I can see. Microsoft invents a way of doing things and implements it in IE. Everyone else decides that the standard will do things as differently as possible from that, and a standard is released several years later. Microsoft ignores the standard and web site authors end up using the Microsoft implementation, since they want their site to work on IE.

ODF vs OOXML is similar too. Office has been around for ages and loads of legacy cruft in it. E.g. the date format in Office copies a bug from Lotus 1-2-3 so that Excel uses the same internal date representation as Lotus 1-2-3. And this date format is preserved in OOXML. The ODF people came along and whined and whined that OOXML was making bugs the standard and ODF was technically superior. But if you save Excel spreadsheets into ODF, my guess is that the ones that rely on this sort of thing will stop working.

Now most people don't care about the internals of this stuff. People back when Office took over from Excel did things like calculating date serial numbers using a formula and they wanted to be able to load that Lotus sheet into Excel and have it generate the same date. So Microsoft copied the bug. The few percent of people now that embed dates in spreadsheets as a numeric constant will find that saving as OOXML works for them and saving as ODF doesn't. But Microsoft's monoply is built out things like this. There are loads of quirks in their platform that a few percent of people rely on. If you want to replace them, you need to handle this. Just like when Microsoft took over from Lotus they copied Lotus quirks and outright bugs.

Connectors are all fine well, but the time and energy necessary to buy, hang on to, and connect them makes such connectors a niche market. The operative word is convenience, and the more technical version of it is Metcalfe's law. Everyone has USB, therefore everyone makes USB devices, and therefore more people get USB. Apple killed (or at least harmed) the virtuous cycle that might've made FW a standard in 1998 - 2000. Now only a very small number of machines (relative to the size of the market) have FW800, and that number is unlikely to rise because of the chicken and egg problem.

More recently I began a business blog called Grant Writing Confidential with my Dad, and I had Wordpress install by our ISP because I was already familiar with it, in addition to all the advantages listed by the GP. By then, Wordpress had impressed me sufficiently that Movable type wasn't even in the running because I hadn't found any limitations or major irritations in Wordpress.

The big knock on Wordpress is that so many of the themes make it obvious that you're using a Wordpress blog. This has some validity and is true for my blogs, although a little bit less so for the second. Still, I think the reason so many blogs use a two- or three-column style is because it's logical way to organize a blog. Few people criticize books because they (mostly) have a spine and two covers and a table of contents and what not, while all that varies between them is art. I suspect we're entering that general phase of blogging, which also makes it easier to read blogs because you only have to figure out where the common elements are, rather than a whole new system for each blog.

In other words, Wordpress/Blogger motifs are creating a common user interface, making the presentation less important and the content more important. Sounds like my conception of what "Web 2.0" should be doing: making this easier on us. I'm not the first person to have thought along these lines, but it's still worth noticing. For that matter, /. could do worse than use the web-based posting window of Wordpress, with its "visual" and "code" views (he mutters to himself as he checks all his paragraph tags).

The number one reason: "You never get to do things the right way". So maybe some of the blame is circumstances?

One thing you see a lot when there is a transition from an old monopoly to a new monopoly is that there is a magic "tipping point": one morning, you wake up and your product has 80% market share instead of 20% market share. This flip tends to happen very quickly (VisiCalc to 123 to Excel, WordStar to WordPerfect to Word, Mosaic to Netscape to Internet Explorer, dBase to Access, and so on). It usually happens because the very last barrier to entry has fallen and suddenly it's logical for everyone to switch.

Take a look at Joel Spolsky's "Strategy Letter V": http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html

This tendency for computing projects in non-computing organizations to be "just barely functioning" is discussed by Joel Spolsky in a talk he gave to some students of CS at Yale recently: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/12/03.html

Rings true to me.

Aside from the fact that open layout has been in use for hundreds of years elsewhere* I doubt that breaking down the cubicle walls will dramatically increase productivity everywhere. Developers for example need their private space for their work (others wrote about it, if noone cited that article yet).
But if someone works from home (s)he already has that much required personal space at home, and doesn't care if the place is more 'social' in the official office.
By the way that layout sure will spread in the next years due to the catchy words you can attach to them: 'social', 'open', 'collaborate', 'flexible' instead of 'closed', 'walls', and 'cube' (as a boring kind of shape).

*Don't know about you but to me cubeless offices bring the picture of some Scandinavian postal office where the customers can watch the clerk picking his nose.

As to why private offices are such a good idea.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BionicOffice.html

Normally the open plan offices translate into qualitative benefits in the company (people are happier, more collaborative, less secretive etc...).

Oh really? And that applies to software development as well does it? And it means more productivity as well, right - of course many people are happy to sit in a big open office and chat all day, but do they get more work done?

Joel believes it's all rubbish and private offices are much more productive. Personally, I have seen exactly the same thing. When I started at my current job we all were in one room. It was very sociable and we all agreed on what to do ... for every. Single. Task. Amazingly our boss noticed this and deliberately gave us separate offices, and this seems a lot better. You can still go and chat to people, but you don't involve everyone just to talk to one guy, and when people need to concentrate they can.

Frankly, those studies are either not applicable or just missing the point.

Normally the open plan offices translate into qualitative benefits in the company (people are happier, more collaborative, less secretive etc...).

Oh really? And that applies to software development as well does it? And it means more productivity as well, right - of course many people are happy to sit in a big open office and chat all day, but do they get more work done?

Joel believes it's all rubbish and private offices are much more productive. Personally, I have seen exactly the same thing. When I started at my current job we all were in one room. It was very sociable and we all agreed on what to do ... for every. Single. Task. Amazingly our boss noticed this and deliberately gave us separate offices, and this seems a lot better. You can still go and chat to people, but you don't involve everyone just to talk to one guy, and when people need to concentrate they can.

Frankly, those studies are either not applicable or just missing the point.

Contrast that with Joel's Software, where each person gets his/her own office with a window, read what he says about it and how it improves productivity. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BionicOffice.html