Open Kosmaczewski

suecia

Adrian — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 20:27:57 +0000

en suecia, al menos en göteborg, hay luces en cada ventana.

dicho asi, parece una tremenda boludez, pero es asi: mirando las fachadas de cualquier edificio, cada ventana tiene un velador entre cada cortina. siempre. de esos veladores de mesa de luz, con su pantalla color crema, dando una luz acaramelada, melosa, calida, que contrasta con el frio exterior. en medio de la ventana, un velador, en cada ventana de cada edificio de cada avenida.

es una ciudad donde las calles estan cubiertas de piedritas.

dicho asi, parece otra tremenda boludez, pero ayuda a que la gente camine sin matarse entre los manchones de nieve, algunos a medio derretir y otros transformados en montañas de hielo y polvo. hay piedritas sueltas, que ayudan a que el zapato agarre mejor la calzada, a medio camino entre arena y canto rodado, en cada tramo de cada vereda de cada avenida.

es un pais raro.

los restoranes estan repletos a las 15 como en españa, pero vacios a las 19 como ni siquiera en suiza. la gente desayuna panceta con huevo y porotos con tomate, pero no hay gordos en las calles; es mas, son todos flacos de un metro noventa promedio. son tan rubios que a los albinos les dicen morochos. en los tranvias, las maquinas que te venden el boleto tienen un boton que dice “english” pero que igual te da las instrucciones en sueco. la gente es seca pero cordial, parece que te van a mandar a la mierda en cualquier momento; y cuando te ven con un mapa se paran y te preguntan si necesitas ayuda, con una gentileza que desmorona. pronuncian las “a” como “o”, y la “y” suena como una “u” francesa. y si es una “å” con redondelito es diferente de si es una “ä” con dieresis. hay locales de venta de “gudis” por todos lados, vendiendo golosinas a granel; agarrate una bolsa en la entrada y paga a la salida, al peso.

deci que no manejan por la izquierda, como los ingleses, eso ya seria mucho.

Similar Posts:

Best Books of 2009

Adrian — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 15:06:15 +0000

Every year I’m doing the same post (well, in 2006 I completely forgot to do it) that starts more or less with the same phrase: “every year I like to read at least 6 new tech books, and to learn a new programming language.”

Last year’s language was Go, and the books, well, here we go:

Software Engineering: Barry W. Boehm’s Lifetime Contributions to Software Development, Management, and Research

Barry Boehm is a name that might not strike a chord immediately, but if you work in the software field, it should. He has been working non-stop for the past 50 years (that’s right, 50), discussing all kind of subjects related to the practice of software engineering. This book is a compilation of his most well-known papers, with subjects ranging from project management to components, from iterative techniques to developer productivity. The guy has written about all of it, and when you realize how right he was, you wish you had read those papers earlier in your career.

The iPhone Developer’s Cookbook: Building Applications with the iPhone SDK

Erica Sadun is a legend in the iPhone software engineering field. Her involvement with the iPhone developer community from the very beginning (during the dark times of jailbroken iPhones) has increased since the release of the official iPhone SDK in March 2008. Her articles on Ars Technica or The Unofficial Apple Weblog are epic, and her book could not be other than a masterpiece. Make no mistake: this is not a book for beginners (and, by the way, the second edition has recently been published) but it is the perfect companion for all of us who spend a life in Xcode and the SDK. I hope she will continue providing more editions of this book, particularly now that the iPad has been announced, and will be released soon.

Beautiful Teams: Inspiring and Cautionary Tales from Veteran Team Leaders

O’Reilly has some very successful book series, like the “Head First” and the “Beautiful” ones. The latter, very similar in spirit and nature to the “At Work” series of books by Apress, provides a series of interviews to key industry players, in different fields, highlighting real-world experiences. This book takes this approach and brings an incredible series of war stories from organizations like IBM, Media Molecule or the NASA, told by Grady Booch, Tim O’Reilly, Cory Doctorow, Steve McConnell and, yes, even Barry Boehm. This book reinforced my belief that software is a social process, and I think that you will enjoy these stories about how many well-known products we use and love (or hate) every day have been brought to market, and how their teams struggled to stay together – or how they miserably failed.

Core Animation for Mac OS X and the iPhone: Creating Compelling Dynamic User Interfaces

The iPhone OS and Mac OS X both share a legacy of design, attention to detail and awesomeness that can be explained by the sole existence of a single set of APIs: Core Animation. This library allows developers to create stunning visual effects with great performance and with just a few lines of code. The rational use of animations is considered a huge usability win, bringing context awareness to users, helping them understand what’s going on their applications and providing feedback and a “real world” feel to software. Bill Dudney provides here a short yet complete introduction to the concepts behind Core Animation, both for the Mac OS X and iPhone OS; all in all a must have for all Cocoa and Cocoa Touch developers.

Pragmatic Version Control Using Git

I’ve been a happy Subversion user for years. I’ve kept svn repositories for my Master’s degree work, my personal documents and of course for most of my projects. However, the server-centric nature of Subversion always made me think twice before creating a repository, and not being able to browse repository contents without a specialized client was always a pain in the neck. Not to name the fact that branching in svn is harder than it should be IMHO. Git changed all of that. Creating repositories with Git is not only cheap, it’s easy and fast, and branching could not be easier. This book was the one that showed me that there was a better way, and now with my Github account, I can’t think of any other way to handle any kind of project. This book provided the initial knowledge to get started, and I strongly recommend it to anyone who wants to learn more about Git.

The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich

Tim Ferriss is a strange kind of guy. He comes up with this book and tells you that you are working too much, that having a boss is killing you, and that you should be sipping margaritas in the Caribbean instead. And then he proceeds to show you how to do it. This book is interesting in many aspects, the first of which is the irreverent tone and the complete faith the guy has in his method. I could not agree with everything he said but I have to agree with the fact that he’s really convincing. Tim believes in what he says and the book is a really funny one, and I can’t deny that reading it helped me take the final decision to start my own company. So, in any case, beware! This book is dangerous :)

Similar Posts:

Ask Me Anything

Adrian — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 12:17:37 +0000

Exactly what you have read: if you have any question for me, don’t hesitate and post it in formspring.me/akosma. I’ll be glad to answer it for you! Of course, iPhone-related questions are top priority. But progressive rock questions are, too. And of course, anything related to Argentina and Switzerland. And software in general. Well, that makes for a lot of subjects; start firing!

Similar Posts:

The Very Quick And Sloppy Guide To Argentine Rock

Adrian — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 12:36:24 +0000

From Wikipedia:

The Argentine rock movement was truly one of the first non-English forms of rock to be commercially successful outside its own nation.

Argentine rock, which was the first kind of rock in Spanish ever to emerge in either Spain or Latin America, has a “founding trilogy” in 1967 with three mythical bands:

Los Gatos (“The Cats”), similar to the Beatles, they disbanded in the 60’s;
Manal, more of a blues / hard rock thing, first aligned with the Stones and later aligned with the heavy metal movement until the 80’s;
Almendra (“Almond”) which was the real start of argentine progressive rock, also disappeared in the 60’s.

The founder of Almendra is the ENORMOUS, GIANT, KING OF PROGRESSIVE, Luis Alberto Spinetta, one of the best musicians of the 20th century, without any doubt, with over 45 years of a non-stop career. He’s still playing occassionally, and in 1973 he recorded with a later band (“Pescado Rabioso”, “Rabid Fish” in Spanish) the album “Artaud” which is regarded as one of the highest moments of argentine progressive rock, and one of the best albums of its time.

Listen to track #7 “Bajan” (“They are going down”) and #9 “Las Habladurias del Mundo” (“The Gossip of the World”). Those two tracks are the best IMHO, but in the good progressive fashion, the album is a highly conceptual one with a central story centered around Antonin Artaud’s poems, that can be listened from start to end like a an opera.

Spinetta played not long ago in the Colón Theatre, one of the most important and biggest opera houses of the world, which is said to have “one of the five best acoustics in the world”…! I’ve been there twice. It’s unbelievably beautiful.

Sumo: this band was formed in 1981 by Luca Prodan, an Italian/English guy who went to Argentina to escape his heroin addiction, but died of cyrrhosis and cocaine in 1988, after having changed the argie music forever. He was the only one who dared sing in English in Argentine radios during the Falkland’s war.

His death was so terrible to argentines that graffittis saying “Luca Not Dead” still appear (written in English) in Buenos Aires. His influence is absolute. All the bands now say they were influenced by Sumo. I still remember the newspapers announcing his death. I was in secondary school at the time. All the kids were sad, even crying.

I recommend their album Divididos por la Felicidad (“Divided by Happiness”). Start with the all-time-classic #1, “La Rubia Tarada” (“The Dumb Blonde”), a rant against the trendy first class of Buenos Aires in the 80’s, and then move to #7, “Mejor no Hablar de Ciertas Cosas” (“Better not to talk about some things”). These two songs are simply, classics.

After Prodan died, Sumo split into two bands: Divididos (“Divided”) and Las Pelotas (“The Balls”). The first is more commercial and high profile, the second more progressive and underground. Divididos is called the “La Aplanadora del Rock” (“The Leveller of Rock”) given that they offer mega-concerts (at 100′000 people piece) lasting over 4 hours of pure rock.

Divididos’ album Narigón del Siglo (“Big-nosed-guy of the Century”) was recorded at Abbey Road studios, and is particularly representative of Divididos. This is really, really a rock band, in the purest sense of the term. My preferred tracks are #6 “Elefantes en Europa” (“Elephants in Europe”), which will explain you the “The Leveller of Rock” nickname…! And #11 “Pasiones Zurdas Derechas” (“Right-wing Lefty Passions”). Amazing rock. Really puts you in good mood.

From Las Pelotas’, I recommend Mascaras de Sal (“Masks of Salt”). Much more studied, thoughtful, very interesting and progressive. I love it. I recommend “Senderos” (“Paths”), track #1. But the whole album is simple IN-CRE-DI-BLE.

Soda Stereo: (“Stereo Sparkling Water”) is one the best selling argentine acts of the last 30 years. They are the incarnation of argentine pop, simple, and pure. They started in 1981 and finished in 1997 with a mega concert of 3 days in the largest football stadium in Buenos Aires. Listen to their 20 Greatest Hits album, for your listening pleasure: they are REALLY good, timeless kind of good. Start with tracks #3 “Nada Personal” (“Nothing Personal”) which is really representative of their 80’s, and then go to tracks #15 “Lo Que Sangra – La Cúpula” (“What Bleeds – The Cupola”) and #14 “Un Millón de Años Luz” (“One Million Light-Years”), the latest a much more mature and elaborated song, considered the most beautiful track of the band. Really my all time favorites.

Finally, Bersuit Vergarabat (or simply Bersuit, a name that doesn’t mean anything, really :) simply put, the most important band of the past 20 years. And still alive and kicking. They are very good. Capables of everything and anything: ska, rock, tango, pop, samba, murga, etc. Bersuit is one of those bands that 40 years from now will have streets named after them. They are really the biggest milestone in Argentine music since Sumo.

Their most interesting studio album is Hijos del Culo (“Sons of the A**” :) Listen to #12 “Negra Murguera” (“Black Woman from the Murga”) and #2 “La del Toro” (“The Song of the Bull”). The whole album goes from one style to the other, their lyrics are hilarious and at the same time terrible, they really sing the Argentine of today.

To close the loop, here’s the main singer of Soda Stereo (Gustavo Cerati, on the left) with Spinetta himself (at the right) singing “Bajan” from Pescado Rabioso (which I mentioned above) live:

And the argentine rock fan watches in awe, reverence, wonderment, admiration, as two epochs meet, greet and sing.

This video is a cornerstone moment in the history of argentine rock. I’m almost in tears.

Similar Posts:

Del.icio.us to WordPress

Adrian — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 10:44:59 +0000

I’ve just uploaded a new project on Github called delicious_wp: it’s a small Ruby script that simply fetches the items stored in del.icio.us the previous week and creates a blog post with them. You can set up a small cron job to execute this script every week, which is what I’ve done for this blog :) I know del.icio.us has a similar feature integrated, but it executes daily, instead of weekly, which is what I wanted.

To use it, just clone the repository, copy the config.yaml.sample file as config.yaml and edit its values inside. Run the script and voilà! A new blog post entry with your del.icio.us bookmarks.

The script can also be helpful to those wondering how to use the XML-RPC interface of WordPress from a Ruby script, or how to use the Net::HTTP library to consume a REST API.

Enjoy! As usual, the code is released with a BSD license.

Similar Posts:

Reflexions on the Software Business

Adrian — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 07:54:21 +0000

There are basically two things you can do to earn a living when you write code:

Consulting
Products

When doing consulting, you write code, and somebody else owns it; you are blamed for its bugs, rarely praised for its benefits, and usually you only sell one copy of your work. When working on products, you write code, and you actually own it; you can brag about it on your blog without pissing anyone, and if you are lucky you sell as many copies of it as you want, all for basically the same production cost.

Now, here’s an insider tip: if your objective is living a nightmare, tearing yourself apart and swear never touching a keyboard again, choose option 1. If your objective is enjoying a healthy life, making money and living long and prosper, choose option 2.

This fact is explained by economists as a “diseconomy of scale”: this means that fixed costs are very low relative to variable costs, which means that the cost of creating a new copy of your finished product is virtually zero. You only have to invest in the building, not on the replication. Actually this is not 100% true, because you should spend on marketing anyway, and you might as well add new features on the way, but the truth is that well-run software companies make more money than drug dealers, and guess what: software is an activity usually considered legal.

However, there is a tacit consensus in Switzerland, apparently, by which there can’t be successful companies doing software in this side of the world. And most companies choose option 1 above. Which has interesting side effects.

Consulting

Consulting, just like the airline industry, succeeds in one particular point: it pisses off everyone involved in it. Let’s be frank; clients are seldom happy of the end result, while consultants have to deal with horrible working environments (read: open spaces). The only ones actually enjoying this market are the (usually non-technical) owners of consulting companies, who take pride in the fact of selling an “expert” to a company for around CHF 1000 per day (much more in the case of SAP), while they pay less than CHF 300 to the same consultant. The remaining 700 go to “operational costs”, of course, including the bonuses paid to managers of these companies on the backs of the workers.

Welcome to “Capitalism 101″. You have to afford that new Porsche somehow.

Not only are consultants screwed from day one, with the typical speech of “we are a human company, people is our first priority”, they also get fired first whenever the market shrinks. They have to beg for training and to be sent to conferences, while their managers go to corporate retreats in Davos or Zermatt. Heck, sometimes consultants even have to ask for a proper computer to do their jobs, or are cynically asked to use their own personal equipment.

Oh, and consultants have to fill timesheets, and get punished if they don’t do it. Timesheets are worth an article of their own, in the sense that they are only used as command-and-control tools, and not, as one would think, as the basis for future estimations of upcoming projects. Timesheets are just black holes of information, where you might as well log 8 hours in the “whatever” category and nobody would really care. And estimations are usually done by your non-technical boss, anyway, so screw those historical data.

(Sometimes consultants not only have to fill their employer’s timesheet, but also the customer’s. I remember that at one time I had to fill 3 different timesheets. I could easily spend 2 hours a week making sure everything was right and coherent. And no, there wasn’t any “timesheet filling” entry in the timesheet software. And even worse, timesheet software – web based or not – usually sucks big time.)

OK, I’m probably being unfair here. There are a couple of benefits to being a consultant. I suppose. I hope. But this is not my point.

Products

As shown, the consulting landscape does not look very promising; on one side, many companies try to eat a small consulting market using the same shitty practices. On the other side, thankfully, there are companies who have understood that you can earn a very decent living by creating a nice product and selling licenses (or subscriptions) of it.

As previously, there are interesting side effects to choosing this strategy:

Creating products has the ultimate goal of generating a steady income stream. This frees up energy and resources in your team to build new products, which generate more revenue, which you can spend creating new products… and so on and so forth. You get the idea.
Having to maintain a few products means that you can afford knowing its quirks by heart; you don’t have to context switch from project to project like most consultants do, and you can continuously fix bugs and add new features to it. You feel like the product is your child, and you help it grow and become stronger, more resilient, more powerful. Which helps you sell more copies, etc, etc (see the previous point).
Google’s much touted “20% project time” becomes, in the case of owning your own products, a “100% project time”. You enter a state of continuous creation. You don’t have to explain your choices to a non-technical (read: incompetent) boss: you respond, at most, to what your market demands (read: your customers).
You can create a product suite; the synergy created from one product to the other might suffice to drive sales up of both products all by itself.
You can have a direct contact with your clients, answering their requests and problems, instead of relying on a (usually non-technical) man-in-the-middle strategy.
You acknowledge the fact that 8 hours of coding work is an illusion. I know no developer capable of sitting for 8 hours in front of a computer and writing coherent code, which is what most consultants are expected to get for CHF 1000 per day (the customer doesn’t usually know that a consultant only gets 30% of that sum). A maximum of 5 or 6 hours of pure concentration is already a big win, and the rest should be spent doing paperwork, playing Wii Sports or doing the groceries. Freeing your mind helps you have more ideas, which in turn become products that generate new revenue streams. When you are in consulting mode, you cannot have this liberty. Actually you have no liberty at all.
You can have a real quality strategy. I know no consulting firm which really pays attention to quality (even if most fill their mouths with the Q word). Refactoring, unit testing, user testing, writing requirements and specs are just nonexistent tasks in most consulting companies. When you are creating products, you can take time to do them with the depth that you want; and actually, you do it, and you enjoy it.

Again, I’m really being unfair here. I am concentrating maybe too much into this “circle of virtue” called “product -> revenue -> freedom -> product -> rinse and repeat”. Things are never that easy; when you create a product, you have to choose a platform, find a market for it, invest in the creation part, advertise it, maintain it, support your customers, update your website, burn the CD-ROMs, write in your blog, test your product in the next version of the operating system (or browser), fix that weird Unicode bug, set up the eShop for selling your product, troubleshoot PayPal issues, add entries to the FAQ, participate in trade shows, send demos to magazines, fix the damn coffee machine, and many, many other things.

However hard it might seem, the underlying truths are fundamental: when you own the product, your commitment to quality and your enthusiasm will be unparalleled. And your code will be better just because of that.

Conclusion

I would say that consulting is a viable option to start up, as a short term strategy. There’s a lot of demand for custom software out there, and using your brain to generate cash that way can be used as a quick entry point to bootstrap your own company.

However, in the medium and long term, the only viable strategy for sustained growth in the software industry is the creation and sale of software products. This is the only way to create true value in your own company, helping you create a healthy environment for your staff, fostering creativity, engaging customers with a real experience, and creating a win-win situation for you and your customers.

Of course, creating and managing a product requires skills and objectives which are not the same as your usual consulting project; this is the reason why most consulting companies fail when trying to jump on a product mindset. This will be the subject of a future article.

Similar Posts:

Who do you want to work with?

Adrian — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 12:52:26 +0000

When you are a kid in Argentina, there are invariably three questions that you’ll always get asked whenever you meet a grown up person:

How old are you?
What’s your favorite football team?
What do you want to be when you grow up?

The answer to the first question depends on the moment, of course, and it’s simply a test to see if you know how to count. The answer to the second depends on your parents (this is like religion down there) and the city where you live (but there’s a 90% chance your answer will be either River Plate or Boca Juniors).

The third question, however, is problematic, no matter what the answer is. Because at a large degree we build our lives around that “what do you want to be?” question, whether we like or not what we do, whether we believe or not that what we want to do is doable or not, or if it pays well or not, or if we will like at all, or if we will end up doing something completely different whatsoever by the time we retire.

This single question shapes a lot our lives, without even realizing it, and we pollute otherwise peaceful kids with the realization that there’s much more to life than school and Wii and friends and chocolate milk.

The problem is, for me this is clearly the wrong question to ask. We should be asking kids “who do you want to work with?”, instead.

There’s an old adage that goes like this: “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know”. Life is made of relationships, not pure knowledge got through 12 boring years of study, in a terrible environment made of vertical authorities and obligatory dissertations about horribly dull subjects.

In this blog I’ve often held the hypothesis that most problems in software teams are not technical, that the technical problems have been solved long ago. I think that the root cause for many software problems are social problems, like team cohesion or communication. Likewise, in terms of social relationships, in terms of society, the root causes for our problems lie in our capacity to understand each other.

And in spite of all the efforts and money spent every year in workplace health problems, in spite of all the deaths and the acknowledgement of the existence of assholes in our jobs, we still ask our kids “what do you want to be when you grow up”.

This question seems harmless by itself, but looking closely, it supports several fallacies:

It implies that all professions are carried out similarly whatever you choose to be and whenever you work; that is, you will be as happy and able to carry out your craft whether you are an independent SAP consultant, a blacksmith in Patagonia or if you are a freshly graduated doctor on internship at Seattle’s Grace Hospital. This is simply not true. The amount of initiative, self-drive, learning opportunities, job stability, are simply not the same, and lots of people learn this really late. I know it too well: I have learnt it quite late.
It implies that you will not be independent. When you ask the kid about professions, you are not expecting an answer like the previous “blacksmith in Patagonia” thing, because in our society, being able to ask such a question means that you have the means to send your kids to school (or at least you expect to do so). If you live in a “favela” in Rio de Janeiro, and you barely have enough to eat, you don’t think that much about the future. And if you do, the kid will most probably answer that he wants to be a football player or a TV star. In these places and situations (where most of mankind actually lives and dies every day) the present moment eats all your CPU time. Which means that the medium-class kid will most probably answer with the name of a profession, and apart from some honorable exceptions, universities don’t teach how to be independent, but just how to be another animal in the herd. Which cuts off lots of possibilities, needless to say.
It implies that social groups built around different professions are all comparable. They are not. They do not have the same motivations or ethics. I’ve studied physics (a rather nerdy career) and then switched to economics (a supposedly rather trendy one). The groups of people that gather around professions are not at all comparable, and I must say that I’ve finally settled down working in a field where, as Jeff LaMarche told me once, “the asshole ratio is astonishingly low”. You couldn’t say it better. And I couldn’t be happier about it.
Finally, it implies that the kids know how much money you get in different jobs. This is not a minor point; if a kid wants to choose a path depending on economic reasons, she should be able to do so without external input. I know too many people who regret not choosing a path over another because they did not know the market conditions of each one.

In short, we do not teach our kids to question the world we’re living in, to search for lots of answers before taking decisions, and also, to question the authority, simply because we haven’t been taught to do that. And given the natural human inertia to avoid change, it is somehow natural that our questions to kids reflect what our parents asked us. We tend to repeat mistakes, and that not only works at a macro level, but also at micro level. It is part of human nature.

By asking “who do you want to work with” you ask explicitly your kid to choose between allies and assholes, and given that choice, guess who most kids will choose? The question will also prompt them to learn to accept their own choices, too, because it prompts a thought process much more elaborated than just answering “doctor” or “lawyer” or any other similar politically correct answer.

Kids are much more intelligent than we are, and then we send them to school to avoid having them telling us repeatedly how stupid we are.

Finally, by asking “who do you want to work with?” you are also implicitly asking “who you don’t want to work with?”, which is the second most important question you should ask, and whose answer is not implied by the first. Dilbert is a funny comic, but I don’t see why we keep on behaving that way, when our working life could be much more enjoyable, by any standards.

Try it: if you have a kid, or the next time you meet one, ask her or him this very two questions. You will be surprised of the answers, and you might as well learn something about your own life, too.

Similar Posts:

akosma software has a new website

Adrian — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 07:05:57 +0000

This is something I should have done much earlier, but hey, better late than never: akosma software has a new website and I’m happy to invite you to take a look at it.

Open Kosmaczewski will slowly become a more personal platform, as most of my future iPhone-related material will appear in the new akosma blog. After 5 years of operation, good old Open Kosmaczewski is by no means shutting down; but a new, exciting chapter starts here, definitely.

Thanks again to all of you for your amazing support, your comments and ideas. I look forward to continue serving you through my company, akosma software.

Similar Posts:

Thoughts about Google’s “Go” Programming Language

Adrian — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 10:40:51 +0000

Historically, we can distinguish really big software companies for providing, at least, four major kinds of products: an operating system (sometimes open sourced at a certain level), a web browser (with various degrees of standard compliance), a suite of office applications (slightly compatible with everyone else’s), and a programming language with curly brackets (generally incompatible with everything else). In that particular order, we have:

Microsoft: Windows, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Office, and C#.
Sun: Solaris, HotJava (sic), StarOffice, and Java.
Apple: Mac OS X, Safari, iWork, and Objective-C.
Google: Chrome OS, Chrome, Google Docs, and… Go.

Precisely, Go was the last piece that Google had to create in order to fit into the framework above. And it did, with a bright team including Ken Thompson (of Unix and C fame) and Rob Pike (of Plan 9 and UTF-8 fame). With names like that, and with Google’s own funding and infrastructure, it is normal that the media went into a hype frenzy yesterday.

I think, however, that Google’s engineers got tired of what the current and upcoming versions of their “official” programming languages (Java 7, C++0x and Python 3.0) had to offer, and simply came up with a programming language that fits better their needs and expectations. As one of the slides of the TechTalk says, with current languages “You can be productive or safe, not both.”

Features like built-in support for concurrency or garbage collection hide the real true feature behind the language: faster build times with static typing support. This is important for Google from a software economy point of view: they want more productivity from their developers, or, in other words, more bang for their buck, all together with verifiable quality and speed of execution. Go seems to be designed to deliver in these areas. However, Rob Pike is careful to say that the language is experimental, so time will tell if their efforts were worth it.

In any case, it is worth noting that there was a previous programming language called Go! (whose author even wrote a book about it), and after an InformationWeek article revealed this, a petition has started in the Go bug tracking, asking Google to change the name of the language, all in the name of Google’s own “Don’t be evil” motto.

Similar Posts:

5 years

Adrian — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 11:48:47 +0000

Today it’s the 5th anniversary of the article that would eventually become the first post of this blog. I was leaving Buenos Aires, again, and I wrote that on my old G3 iBook in the airport of Ezeiza, right before boarding. That trip was very important, for many reasons that don’t fit on a single blog entry.

Since then, I met Claudia, we got married, I finished my master degree and started my own company. Even hernún came to Switzerland! I’ve moved from talking about .NET to giving interviews about the iPhone. I’ve published as much text and code as I could, but most importantly, I kept on creating things.

Thanks to all of you, for your comments, your support, your ideas, your code, your critics. I’ve really learnt a lot during these years, and I hope my ramblings will be useful to you in the future as well.

Cheers! Salud! Santé!

Similar Posts: