AmericanGlory

WardCunningham gave a XP2003 keynote about selecting a method to suit the materials to be worked. To illustrate his points Ward used programs written in different languages (Java, C++, C, assembler, ...) to implement an application that generated doppler effect circles on a video screen.

At dinner we talked about another less serious project that he worked on with his son using the same microcontroller, see http://www.c2.com/~ward/glory

What I thought was interesting about what Ward was saying was the language comparison - which languages are more productive than other languages. He said that in terms of how many lines of code it takes to achieve something you can say that

C > Java > Smalltalk > spreadsheets

and then proceeded to say how much he liked languages like python and ruby, and thought they were better for an agile project than C#, C++ or Java. He pointed out that if you use a testing framework like FIT your tests are in some way language independant, which gives you the opportunity to switch the language you use in a project, and yet retain the tests. The point being that although you can do an XP project in assembler (he demonstrated it with his doppler cirlces), you'll be faster and more agile in something like smalltalk.

I'm a little skeptical about this idea of switching language in a project - only part of the FIT test is language independant - you still code up a fixture like in JUnit, it's just the data that comes from the HTML.

Otherwise, I'm pretty positive to the idea of using say, Python instead of Java. I've worked in both, and the feeling I get from working in Python is more agile. I think I am more productive, and the unit tests do the job of a compiler and more. If you use Jython then you can mix Java and Python code too. The only thing is that tool support - IDEs and refactoring browsers and things - are way behind for Python.

Someone wrote up a quote from Ward on a poster near the entrance to the conference - I can't remember exactly, but I think it was

"I think some people are afraid to use powerful languages because they think they are weird"

--EmilyBache