[FRIAM] Seaside (Smalltalk web development framework)

[Frank Wimberly]

On Sep 14, 2006, at 3:17 AM, Marcus G. Daniels wrote:



While possible, the idea that 
university or hobby software can be better than software developed by a 
multi-billion dollar corporations doesn't jump out as a likely scenario.
 
Interoperability is God, and failing to provide it is a fine reason for 
a software project to fail!
 
Let's see.  I have worked for multi-billion dollar companies (Bell Labs
when it was part of AT&T, General Motors and Westinghouse).  And I have
worked for Universities (Carnegie Mellon University, University of
Pittsburgh and the University of West Florida at the Institute for Human
and Machine Cognition).
 
At Bell Labs I worked on software administration methodologies for No.
5ESS.  At the time I left there were about 200 software developers
working on various components of the "switch" (call processing, OS,
database and many others).  My colleagues used to complain that we had
to spend almost all our times in meetings.  The language used was C and
development occurred across many machines (Vaxen) and had to be
integrated.  Standards were necessary and became a great point of
contention.  So did tools.  Sometime someone would say, "You know if you
could just get the 10 right people in a room together you could get this
developed much more quickly."  In the meantime we were hiring masters
level developers at a very high rate.  The technical staff would say to
the management, "Haven't you read 'The Mythical Man Month'" and the
bosses would answer, "Yes, keep hiring."
 
I left there to go to CMU's Robotics Institute.  This was about 1980.
Brian Reid was a graduate student who had developed the Scribe Document
System alone or with a very small team.  Emacs had been developed by one
guy (rms) at MIT and James Gosling converted it for use on Unix.  Rick
Rashid and a few graduate students developed the kernel of the Mach
operating system.  Now, none of these projects were on the same scale as
the ESS software, where the target was a distributed processor with
extremely high demands for real-time reliability but they still seemed
to yield very impressive products.
 
It seems to me like there are two different kinds of software projects
and they have different needs in terms of types of resources and
approaches.  It is interesting, however, that Rick Rashid has been VP
for research at Microsoft for many years.  I assume he still is.
 
 
Frank
 
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