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Ask Jazz Technical Lead Dr. Erich Gamma

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the sing-me-a-tune dept.

As IBM continues to build out Jazz, their community-oriented development site, technical lead Dr. Erich Gamma has offered to answer questions about Jazz or anything else in his realm of expertise. Among his many accomplishments, Erich worked with Kent Beck on the Java unit testing framework, JUnit, and was actively involved until JUnit 4. Dr. Gamma was also one of the fathers of Eclipse and the original lead on the Eclipse Java development tools. Feel free to fire away on Eclipse, Java, JUnit, the Rational suite, the Jazz site, or anything else you think Erich might be able to answer. Usual Slashdot interview rules apply. Update 19:05 GMT by SM: As pointed out by user Hop-Frog, Dr. Gamma is also co-author of the influential computer science textbook Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software.

4 of 83 comments (clear)

  1. The Directions of the Eclipse Foundation by eldavojohn · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Dr Gamma was also one of the fathers of Eclipse and the original lead on the Eclipse Java development tools.

    Eclipse has been going on since the early 2000s and six days ago enjoyed the release of Galileo (v3.5). If you've had time to look at recent release, what are your opinions on what Eclipse has become? Has it made any wrong turns? How do you respond to criticisms of "bloat" or "too resource intensive"? Do you see it becoming more than what it is or transforming?

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    My work here is dung.
    1. Re:The Directions of the Eclipse Foundation by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Plugins.

      Eclipse is an awesome platform for Java. As good as Netbeans. Over the years I've checked it out and I've never felt the desire to stay with it like I do with Netbeans.

      But when it comes to developing in other languages, Eclipse just doesn't cut and Netbeans blows the doors off of it.

      Some examples:

      When I downloaded the previous version of Galileo, from the menu I installed the plugins for C++. I couldn't get the C++ compiling and linking to work.

      BPEL?!?! They wanted me to GO BACK a couple of versions of Eclipse. I couldn't even find it on the net.

      Anyway, that's not the Eclipse foundations problem. What is their problem is the dependencies installation of the plugins. There's been times where I try to install a plugin and after a while it says I need another, the that dependency says I need a couple of more, and then those dependencies say I need more, and eventually, one dependency fails. Spent a couple of hours over that. What can't Eclipse do all that horseshit for me?

      There's other things that I don't like about the UI and the way Eclipse handles projects and their dependencies in Java. I went to Netbeans six months ago and never looked back. I am very happy with Netbeans and I don't see any reason to try to go back to Eclipse.

  2. New Important Design Patterns? by eldavojohn · · Score: 5, Interesting

    On your influential book regarding design patterns, you listed 23 design patterns that would become the foundation for the concept of design patterns in computer science. Since then, many more types and subtypes have arisen but a lot of them seem to be derivatives or a combination of others. What new design patterns if any do you wish you had included in your book or that you feel are necessary for competent developers to learn?

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    My work here is dung.
  3. On the Current State of Academia? by eldavojohn · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I know a lot of people that are very vocal about what is right and wrong with education today. Especially college institutions: "No one teaches C, everyone teaches four years of Java, no one understands the theory, a CS grad doesn't even know what a model-view-controller pattern is." The list goes on. Since you have your doctorate and have probably spent a lot of time in research and academia, what's wrong with most computer science or engineering programs in general today? What would you like to see more or less of? Are there any subject directions recently taken (EJB, garbage collectors, interpreted languages) you'd like to comment on?

    You seem to be non-opposed to Java which, I'll admit, is rare to me for someone with a doctorate. I would like to hear your views since so often all I hear about Java is that it is slow and only good for people that want cheap software developed quick by beginner developers.

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    My work here is dung.